


attrition

by tragakes (lejf)



Category: Bleach
Genre: M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, emotionally constipated gang rise up, hooooh boy angst, some degree of sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:21:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 34,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24101254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/tragakes
Summary: “You can kiss better than that,” Grimmjow dares, wet-lipped and gleaming-eyed. It’s a game to him.If it’s a game, it’s one of attrition. And Ulquiorra is losing.
Relationships: Ulquiorra Cifer/Grimmjow Jaegerjaques
Comments: 26
Kudos: 110





	attrition

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this sometime back but never put it up. so here ya go. another rarepair, cuz why wouldnt i. 
> 
> some dialogue taken directly from the manga. 
> 
> This story also more or less assumes that you know Ulquiorra's backstory in Bleach Unmasked, which you can find [here](https://www.deviantart.com/ebony-of-the-moon/gallery/30633280/unmasked-english). I really suggest you read it!

Occasionally someone is born incompatible. They live out of sync with the rest of the world. They walk between the lines of the walls and the floors. They don’t breathe on the right beat. They fall out of pace. They’re two dimensional. They can’t fit in. They don’t.

Ulquiorra Cifer. Recently appointed cuatro Espada. 

All the Espada have been pooled together by this man, this _Aizen._

Under Aizen’s new guidance, no one cares if anyone’s compatible. Compatibility isn’t a factor because _personality_ isn’t. What matters to Aizen is power; he uses them as chess pieces and they’re aware of it. Most of them are willing to comply because of the bloodshed, or the carnage, or the fighting, or the promise of further power. Ulquiorra does it simply for something to do. It’s because they’re orders, plain and direct, and Ulquiorra _has_ nothing else in his life. He has no aspirations, no relationships, no attachments. He has and is nothing. He embodies the hollow hole of their souls. 

Ulquiorra … walks out into the sands, sometimes. That is the closest to his own desires as he pursues. He looks for that white tree he’d first broken his body on, because he finds himself drawn to thoughts of that embrace of emptiness. It hadn’t been _death_. It had been the moment he lost everything. It was the quiet, and the white. But he can’t find the tree. It’s not like the others. It exists only in his memory, immortalised, untouched by the annals of time. Perhaps this way is better. It can never be ruined by the disappointments of reality.

That is where Grimmjow finds him, a few hundred miles away and standing on a nameless dune staring out into the desert whose underbelly is teeming with smaller and younger and hungrier hollows, dreaming of the past. “You skipped spar practice,” Grimmjow says. “For what? Looking at the sunset?”

It’s no surprise that he clashes with the sexta Espada on any given day. Grimmjow is violent. He’s outspoken. He’s reckless. He’s too much autonomy to fit in his body. He’s always pursuing his own wishes. 

He says, “You’ve missed them for less.”

“That’s me, though. I didn’t figure _you’d_ be so rogue.”

“I wasn’t aware you had a great understanding of what is ‘normal’, for me.”

“It’s not that hard to know what you’ll do.” Grimmjow looks almost serious. It raises suspicion. “If you don’t have a mission you just stand in your room and look out the window.” 

Ulquiorra realises that whenever Grimmjow leaves his wing in Las Noches, he must look up. He can see Ulquiorra at his place by the window. “You found me here,” Ulquiorra says. Too much effort has been invested by Grimmjow for it to merely be a side observation. It’s aberrant. He struggles to formulate the thought. “You’ve spent— considerable effort to locate me.”

“I really didn’t,” Grimmjow says. “How shitty do you think my tracking skills are? Even if you have your reiatsu suppressed, you’re like a beacon.”

Ulquiorra does not think he assumed wrongly. He knows Grimmjow to put on airs. Moreover, he knows his own reiatsu suppression to be very effective. “You’re attempting to… build a more efficient working relationship with me.“ He tips his head towards Grimmjow, whose expression has suddenly gone blank. He interprets it as confirmation. “This is the first step to establish _friendship_. From what I’ve heard of your history, you desire companionship, and recently many of your past companions have died. Therefore you seek a replacement in the form of me.“

Sand explodes around them, though Ulquiorra catches Grimmjow’s wrist before it can so much as graze his skin. “ _You_ ,” he snarls, the incarnation of fury, “really are fucking arrogant, aren’t you? How could you think you’d measure up to them!?”

Ulquiorra, it appears, has assumed wrongly. Bristling, Grimmjow twists out of Ulquiorra’s grasp.

“You don’t resemble anything, mister _nothing_ ,” he says.

Grimmjow storms off; Ulquiorra doesn’t follow. He failed in this interaction. It’s not unusual. Even among the Espadas he is an oddity. Unlike them, he was born both as an arrancar and in a shell. At no point was he an adjuchas, or a gillian. He always, simply, has _been_. He has no insight into the thoughts of his peers. He lacks his own eloquence. He is unfamiliar with body language. For the majority of his existence he could not speak, could not sleep, could not breathe, could not feel, could not see, could not hear — and it shows. Although he shed his shell, he remains in this trance-like state and bogged down with his melancholy.

Ulquiorra walks further into the depths of Hueco Mundo as though following the sun. Feeling tremulous, like a plucked string, he stops on the crest of a desert hill. The sand is still warm. Yes. He kneels down to feel it. He can feel that. He should express it. How can he express it? Being able to feel even heat is still alien. How to comprehend it? Something so simple as being warm was never afforded to him since he was born in the pit, at the bottom of the world, under great pressure. Darkness condensed. How could he understand other hollows? They are the remaining spirits of human beings. They’re the lingering, vengeful emotions of human beings. 

They’re trash.

They’re useless to him. They take up space. They make noise. They ruin everything they can. In some deeply buried way, Ulquiorra resents even Aizen. He was the one who pulled him out from the tree that he’d impaled himself on. Aizen was the one who took him away from that end. Just let him throw himself away. It’s all pointless. They come into the world with nothing and should leave with nothing. What are they looking for? They’re just trash.

Some time ago Ulquiorra had entered the human world and found himself on an island in the ocean. It had been peaceful, quiet, and the waves washed up body after body. Birds. Fish. Turtles. Bottles. Colours. Trash. This is how Ulquiorra feels. A plastic bottle that has been floating and is now beached. There are thousands more with him, all plastic pieces, poisoning themselves and poisoning everything around them as they break apart.

At the very least the sand had been nice. Unlike the sand of Hueco Mundo that feels painted with blood and ancient, the sand of earth was so _sedate_. It whispered stories of sunlight and wind to him. Ulquiorra would want to go back someday.

Maybe he does have wants. An island for himself. That’s something he’d want. 

He realises, then, that Grimmjow has come back. He’s approaching somewhere on his right. He must’ve tracked Ulquiorra down again. He doesn’t say anything immediately when he approaches, nor when he sits in the sand beside him. Ulquiorra hadn’t expected an apology. Grimmjow doesn’t provide apologies. Ulquiorra wouldn’t know what to do with an apology, anyway. Hold it in his hands. Feel if it’s warm. Keep it somewhere safe.

“It’s ‘cause,” Grimmjow says in his typical harsh timbre, and doesn’t look at Ulquiorra when he’s talking. Maybe he thinks it’s too private and revealing to meet eyes, “you’re… _you_. I thought it was just a thing you did, ‘cause we’re all fucking mad in some way. But, sometimes, I dunno. I get the feeling that when you walk out here you aren’t gonna come back.”

When he speaks he’s so warm-blooded that there’s the slightest steam from his lips. Ulquiorra watches it in fascination. “Ridiculous,” he replies in that bland way of his. “I have a duty in Las Noches.”

Grimmjow’s hackles rise. “Just trying to be concerned for another Espada. Forget it. I knew we were all bastards. Fucking stupid…” He’s turning away, about to leave, but then he freezes. Ulquiorra has leaned over to him and touched a finger to shoulder. 

“You’re warm,” Ulquiorra says.

“You’re so damn weird,” Grimmjow mutters. He removes Ulquiorra’s hand, though he does it surprisingly gently, folding Ulquiorra’s slender fingers in his grasp. His hand is warm. Warmer than water on a sunny day. 

“I know,” Ulquiorra says. He doesn’t know what it is in his tone that makes Grimmjow pause, but something does. His hand is so warm. Grimmjow clasps both his hands over it. His fingers are large and broad. They look powerful, but Ulquiorra knows they don’t stand a chance against him. It’s an illusion of strength. But it doesn’t matter. Ulquiorra doesn’t want to fight him. 

“What’re you out here looking at?” Grimmjow peels his gaze away to scan the desert instead.

“The ocean.”

“Yeah, real funny.”

“I sit and think of the sea,” Ulquiorra repeats, unfazed. “Before it, everything is nothing. If all this sand were water, driven by a single force greater than us — blue as this…” His other hand reaches up and flicks at a strand of Grimmjow’s hair. Grimmjow’s expression flashes through a variety far too quick and complex for him to decipher. “One can imagine Hueco Mundo is an ocean,” he says. “In its deepest trenches it fosters creatures that have never seen the light. Whatever light they see, they attempt to destroy — and it fights them in turn. Imagine an anglerfish. If the anglerfish seeks light, real light, and it swims to the surface, and dies.“

Ulquiorra speaks and speaks of beasts beneath the waves whose bones grow into the surface as fractured trees until his throat feels dry. When he looks to his right, Grimmjow has his eyes closed. He’s asleep. His chest falls and rises like the tide. Ulquiorra cautious leans closer, feeling his heat. Then he curls into Grimmjow’s side, his heat. His crime. 

*

They make a habit out of it as the years pass. 

If Ulquiorra isn’t killing somebody for Aizen, he’s up in his tower, looking over the sands of Hueco Mundo. After night falls, when the moon goes down, Grimmjow might arrive. He likes to climb in through the window and somehow looks wicked every time. His grin is a scythe. Then he’ll shatter the image and complain about Yammy’s dog, Nnoitra’s perversion, and Aizen’s orders. Mostly, Ulquiorra listens. Sometimes he tries to give advice for Grimmjow to temper his edges, but Grimmjow never follows it. He complains and says that Ulquiorra doesn’t have a sense of fight. Eventually, however, Grimmjow always falls asleep. 

Ulquiorra has never slept. He doesn’t know how to. He never has been able to. He’s always trained at night instead. Once Grimmjow is asleep he carefully repositions Grimmjow to sidle into his heat and spends the next few hours basking in his presence. The sexta Espada always wakes with Ulquiorra in his arms. When he does, he pushes his face in Ulquiorra’s hair and asks if Ulquiorra slept. Ulquiorra says that he cannot. Sleep is for those weaker than he. Loop. Repeat. 

Grimmjow looks at him as though searching for something. He treats him as though he’s fragile. Ulquiorra thinks that’s foolish. _Grimmjow_ is the one who keeps hacking at the ropes. He keeps trying to push Aizen. He’s too outspoken. His temper is volatile — although Ulquiorra doesn’t mind his temper. Ulquiorra will never yell back. He will never attack to return that anger. Others will, and that is why the anger is foolish. 

He thinks Grimmjow is too ambitious. Nothing about him has changed since becoming Ulquiorra’s… _friend_. He is still as hot-headed. He still snaps every time Ulquiorra’s strength above him is mentioned. He still obeys nobody unless subdued with force. He is still rash. Ulquiorra does not like those sides of him. He likes the quiet side. He likes Grimmjow here, with him, when he is not fighting and the world itself has quietened to listen. He thinks of this, this critical incompatibility, as his downfall. By no right can Ulquiorra expect Grimmjow to change. Grimmjow has always yearned for destruction. He has and always will be volatile. If that changes, he will cease to be a hollow.

Least of all can Ulquiorra expect Grimmjow to change for _him_. He does not know what Grimmjow desires from their arrangement. Ulquiorra knows what _he_ wants. He wants the carnality of living that Grimmjow brims with. Grimmjow’s veins _thrum_ with life. Ulquiorra can hear it in his steady tide-like heartbeat when he presses his ear to his chest. He feels his sun-like warmth and the toned planes of his body. He sees the flutter of his eyelashes like seabird wings. Ulquiorra sleeps and dreams vicariously through him. He has a companion, a friend, through him. Grimmjow is a feast for the senses. What could Ulquiorra possibly offer in return? Ulquiorra is no witty nor entertaining company. He does not crave destruction nor the exhilaration of a fight. What Ulquiorra craves no longer seems to be the emptiness… these days, it seems to be Grimmjow. The simplicity of being with another being so alive.

Ulquiorra is a hollow, a parched man. Grimmjow is his palette for colour. Ulquiorra can muster up no vigour nor strength in living. Grimmjow is brimming with it. 

Then he discovers what Grimmjow wants from him on a bright moon-lit day. The daylight falls through the window in a spray, and Grimmjow appears at the ledge like some spirit of nature. He grabs Ulquiorra with two hands on both sides of his face and pulls him into a kiss. Ulquiorra’s heartbeat is in his throat. When the shock recedes, he fears he’s disappointing. He’s never kissed anyone before. Then Grimmjow laughs, bright and wild and unhinged, and his smile is like a thousand knives.

“You can kiss better than that,” he dares, wet-lipped and gleaming-eyed. It’s a game to him. It is impossible to miss the mirth in his fey-like grin. Nor can Ulquiorria miss the hints of promises that hide just shy of his predictability. Grimmjow is an intoxication. He’s a strong current. He seals his lips against Ulquiorra’s and seals his fate. 

Afterwards, after Grimmjow follows through the window and pushes Ulquiorra down onto the floor and possesses him utterly and truly— after he has Ulquiorra crumbling and crying out, Ulquiorra rests against his sleeping body and aches. He aches with a physical soreness, and aches with something else that he can put no name to, but that he thinks is something similar to drowning.

*

Each of the Espada have their own quarters. Some own entire wings and entire castles. Ulquiorra owns a relatively quaint tower outside the main dome. The lonely tower, the rest of them call it. It stands a little apart from the other buildings and reaches up solemn and stark against the sky. He doesn’t enjoy Aizen’s fake ceiling inside the dome. Its surface is grainy and there is only one entrance, although Grimmjow tends to help himself to the windows. There is also only one functional room. The entire thing, absurdly — or, at least, Grimmjow laughs about it — contains only one staircase and room, though it can be adjusted to add more.

The crowning room is utterly bare. Only in the last few months, with Grimmjow’s continual appearance, has he installed a double bed. It’s decadent. It’s softer than all the feathers he’s ever seen, wide enough to fit both of them comfortably, and its frame sturdy enough to stand their couplings. Grimmjow had picked it out. He’s familiar with how to indulge. He seems to find it both exasperating and amusing that Ulquiorra doesn’t.

There are many things Grimmjow finds amusing. This morning he’s propped up on an elbow watching Ulquiorra feign sleep. Ulquiorra opens his eyes and meets his gaze, and that prompts his bedmate to smile. “Damn,” Grimmjow says, “you’re adorable.” He grabs the blankets and tucks them beneath Ulquiorra’s head. Ulquiorra is quizzical. It makes Grimmjow smile wider and bestow him with kisses. Like some big and very enthusiastic pet, Grimmjow showers him with so much affection that he ends up mussing all the blankets anyway.

“Get up. I wanna show you something.”

They end up going outside together, and this is when Ulquiorra usually fends off Grimmjow’s possessive acts. After a while of walking a respectable distance apart, Grimmjow tries to slides his arm over Ulquiorra’s shoulders. Ulquiorra — waifish, pale, solemn, — is a slight figure under his muscular build. He knows Grimmjow enjoys the size disparity. He says enjoys enveloping Ulquiorra entirely. Ulquiorra thinks it’s because of the illusion of protection. Grimmjow says he can physically shield Ulquiorra from the world’s madness. It’d be touching if it wasn’t foolish. 

They pass Starrk, and Grimmjow pulls Ulquiorra even closer. Ulquiorra entertains him by allowing it. They run into Nelliel, too, and Ulquiorra senses a few other Espada watching. They all know already. Who knows what they assume. It’s not any particular concern. He knows a good deal of them bed each other anyway. Ulquiorra is too docile to have many enemies that’d consider targeting Grimmjow to get to him. If the opposite happens, if somebody attempts to target Ulquiorra because they’re an enemy of Grimmjow, Ulquiorra will be able to defeat them easily. 

What Grimmjow has to show him ends up being his own wing. Ulquiorra has been inside before, briefly, but somehow they don’t _know_ each other very well. Ulquiorra is very familiar with Grimmjow’s body, and Grimmjow his. They speak of nonsense and summarise their own days. Most of their time is spent actively in bed.

This time he is given a tour. Fraccion members hurry the halls. Most items hold some sort of battle significance. Grimmjow has a room full of battle gear that he doesn’t use but rather that he’s taken off people he’s defeated. Down the caverns of lower Hueco Mundo, the tribes in the mountains to the east, lone champions. There are bone-pieces and the weapons of hollows that he’s conquered and gathered, stockpiling them like they’ll stack to be a throne upon which he can announce his rule. The whole time, Grimmjow talks— about fighting. It’s his most pursued topic. “They’re all too weak,” Grimmjow says. “And the ones that are strong enough, I’m not _allowed_ to fight.” There’s a passion when he speaks about it, a genuine passion, one that’s sometimes absent. 

He lives for the thrill of the hunt, of a single misstep being that slices him open from shoulder to belly, of the rhythm of the blade, of the world’s surge in every swing. Ulquiorra knows this. Ulquiorra should fight him more often, but Ulquiorra doesn’t like fighting.

Grimmjow’s own room is as boisterous as he is. The place is large and airy, and there are tatters of colour everywhere, posters of fake windows, and pictures. “You draw,” Ulquiorra says, surprised. Somehow he didn’t think Grimmjow would’ve. He’s underestimated Grimmjow. There’s more depth. 

“Yeah.” Grimmjow flops down on a sofa that spans one wall of the room. He pats his lap slyly. Ulquiorra sits astride, feeling off-balance until one large hand spans his back and keeps him steady. Grimmjow likes to rub small circles into the curve of his spine.“Those ones behind you are my fracćion. You saw a couple of them before. We were a bunch of adjuchas that ran around together, thinking that if we ate enough hollows, we’d become vasto lordes.” Grimmjow loses himself in that memory, looking at the pictures that surround them. They’re drawn in sketchy hands, many lines intersecting, but the likeliness in all of them are clear. “Shawlong Koufang,” Grimmjow says, pointing. “Edrad Liones, Yylfordt Granz, Nakeem Grindina, Di Roy Rinker. At the end they let me eat them.”

Ulquiorra makes a soft sound in his throat. Once any part of an adjucha is eaten by another, their evolution stops completely. It would prevent them from ever becoming vasto lordes. He knows that the list isn’t complete, either. There were a few that didn’t survive.

“Don’t look like that,” Grimmjow laughs. “It was _honourable_. The damn idiots wanted it. If you think I’m guilty, you’re just as idiotic.”

Then another arm pulls Ulquiorra in so that he’s tucked under Grimmjow’s chin. “And there’s you.” There’s a picture of Ulquiorra up above the bed. It looks unfinished at first glance, but it’s stylistic — the Ulquiorra in the image is looking towards the only window in the room. There are some of the other Espada as well, but they have no such level of detail, and they’re piled up on a desk in the corner of the room. 

“You know, sometimes you have to take things from other people to get to the top,” Grimmjow says. Momentarily, Ulquiorra is dumbfounded. _That_ is what he learns of his friends’ sacrifices? “Sometimes, other people aren’t destined to be. But they do the best by being _stepping stones_ and helping the people who are.”

Ulquiorra tactfully doesn’t voice his true thoughts. “And how do you know what destiny has decided for you?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Grimmjow’s smile is wide, cocky. “When you see them you _know_. Powerful people, prophesied people, they’ve got something going for them. You can see it if they’ve got ambition. They’ve got a part of the universe behind them.”

“That’s observing it in other people. How about yourself?”

Grimmjow puts his hand over his heart. How fortunate for him, that his hollow hole is not where his heart is. It allows him to make these strange sentimental gestures. “Don’t you feel it? It’s like you know there’s something great stretching in front of you and it’s calling to you… Go forward, take it apart, make it all yours. Sit on top of the world.”

Out in Hueco Mundo, Ulquiorra knows of a deep ravine, a slice in the earth that reaches from one horizon to the other, and goes as deep as hell. Ulquiorra has never felt the need to interact with it. Neither does he think that any part of it is reflected in himself.

“I don’t see it,” Ulquiorra says. “Not in you. Nor in anyone.”

He thinks Grimmjow is slightly insulted. A muscle jumps in the Espada’s jaw. He restrains his anger, Ulquiorra has noticed, in his presence. His wrath is ever-present and ever-volatile, but so far Ulquiorra has experienced a grace period. Their honeymoon. Albeit one that has lasted a few good years. He thinks it lasts because they don’t actively try to pry into each other. They satisfy one another with their bodies and it lasts. Or, at least, Grimmjow does. Ulquiorra wants to know him better — know him completely — but doesn’t dare to. “One day you will.” Grimmjow stands and lifts Ulquiorra with him. Ulquiorra makes a quiet noise, part arousal. He likes being held completely like this and enveloped. “I think you’re just stubborn.”

Ulquiorra realises that either disagreeing or agreeing will get Grimmjow what he wants. So he wraps his legs around Grimmjow and simply buries his face into the crook of his neck. “You are more stubborn than me.”

“Heh. Liar.” Grimmjow mouths his hair in reply. “How about we stop talking instead?”

He sets Ulquiorra on the bed, then crawls over him. He pins him down, makes Ulquiorra’s body feel small, unravels him to reveal his core — but there’s nothing inside. That’s what is so terrifying. There _is_ no hidden gem or depth or feeling in him. There is no secret love for art. There is no hidden facet. There is _nothing_ , so Grimmjow fills up that nothingness with himself. When Grimmjow puts him back together with soft touches and kisses he’s rebuilt around whatever Grimmjow has left in him. 

What is this? It’s an ache. It’s a longing. Something that Ulquiorra doesn’t dare to put a name too.

*

Sparring with Grimmjow feels like a dance. Ulquiorra don’t usually enjoy the push and pull of a battle, but Grimmjow brings a level of life to it. It’s his smile and it’s what he says. It’s his emotions. Grimmjow plays out like a reel of expression during a fight. At the clash of reiatsu he grits his teeth and his brows furrow with concentration, but then it melts into pure glee with streaks of determination. He shifts through phases of effort and mirth and solemnity and cajoling. He’s predictable but not — it’s like standing right at the brink of the tide and watching the way the waves crash a little differently each time. 

There’s no risk of Ulquiorra being pulled in and drowning. He’s far too powerful for that. But maybe the tide has already pulled him in in a different way.

*

“What’s your ambition, Grimmjow?”

“Take over the world,” he says, flippantly. The moon is setting. It splashes Las Noches in tones of grey. “Become the most powerful person there is. Beat your ass.“

Grimmjow’s hand sneaks around to the ass in question and gives a squeeze. Ulquiorra groans lowly and tucks himself closer to the other Espada; he can feel Grimmjow’s arousal already beginning to harden against his hip. His lips are gnawing lightly on Ulquiorra’s ear.

Somehow Grimmjow can be multi-faceted and two-dimensional all at once. Ulquiorra didn’t expect a different answer. This is simply how Grimmjow is. This is why Ulquiorra doesn’t push to explore him further. He– _cannot_.

“Why? What’s yours?” Grimmjow says it breathily, not too interested in the conversation at hand anymore..

“I don’t have one,” Ulquiorra replies, honestly. He’s going nowhere — for better or worse. Caught in this circular current. 

*

The sparring grounds are a steaming cracked mess. Sand has melted into glass. Light sprays, prismatic, everywhere. The laughter of Grimmjow and Nnoitra ring disturbingly across the grounds. They’ve both released resurrección, tails, arms, wide blades, and meet each other in showers of sparks. Grimmjow has sustained substantial injuries though it only seems to make him faster. Nnoitra is in worse shape. One of his arms is blasted off in a beam of _cero_.

Nelliel stops to sit beside Ulquiorra, who stands on a ledge above the fight. “You watch them fight for the same reason as I do, don’t you?”

“Their bloodlust is implacable,” Ulquiorra confirms. Nelliel’s expression is momentarily grim, but she looks back down when Nnoitra gives a battle-cry and lunges to his feet despite Grimmjow opening a slash of wounds across his chest. “It often borders suicidal. Aizen-sama ordered me to oversee their duels.”

They, the tres and cuatro Espada, watch the octava and sexta battle. Nelliel sighs. “He _suggested_ that I look after Nnoitra too.”

It would be typical of Aizen. “Nnoitra dislikes you.” Aizen likes to put two hollows who hate each other together. He says that forcing conflict gives way to growth.

Nnoitra has a vengeance against Grimmjow, too. He is constantly challenging Grimmjow for his numbered position. Some days, Ulquiorra finds, Nnoitra is precariously close to winning. He knows that Grimmjow is aware of this threat. He knows that Grimmjow’s victories over Nnoitra are important to him. 

“He really does. It’s so hopeless,” she says. “Do you know he keeps killing hollow villages? He wipes them all out just because he _likes_ to.”

“I imagine that doesn’t sit well with your pacifist tendencies.”

“That’s not the main issue,” she scoffs. “None of you sit that well with my ‘pacifist tendencies’, except Harribel, but we have a weird relationship. Nnoitra shouldn’t _enjoy_ it. By killing them all, he’s even going against Aizen-sama’s orders. It’s all from his own arrogance.”

“We were not chosen for our lack of arrogance,” Ulquiorra comments. “It is not particularly unexpected that none of us have— compatible personalities and values.”

“Then you and Grimmjow?” She raises both her eyebrows. She means the fact that they’re sleeping together. But just because they’re sleeping together doesn’t mean they’re compatible. 

Below, Grimmjow manages to sink a claw into Nnoitra’s mouth and snap it off in his throat. The high-speed regeneration stops it from killing him, but the battle won’t be long now. “I imagine our values will come into contest, someday. For now they aren’t of great importance.” 

“I never took you for someone who needed or wanted something like that.” A relationship? Affection? Blood splatters the sands below. Grimmjow has his teeth bared. “But I guess I don’t know you that well.”

_Ulquiorra_ doesn’t know himself very well. Their relationship is a bomb, ticking down, despite how long it’s held so far. It’s because it’s never been anything _significant_ except for fucking. “It doesn’t matter.”

Grimmjow slits open Nnoitra’s neck. Nnoitra manages to open up Grimmjow’s stomach. It’s a race of regeneration, but Nnoitra’s used much more energy now. “If you say so.” Nelliel seems troubled. “Hey, if he ever turns against you, you can always ask me, right? Out of all of us, I _do_ like you. You’re not crazy.”

“That won’t be necessary.” Ulquiorra isn’t insulted. He appreciates the offer. Nobody else would make it without an ulterior motive. “My issues are my own.” Nnoitra collapses to the ground. Grimmjow throws his head back to roar a laugh. His eyes meet Ulquiorra’s and the laugh eventually morphs into a smile. He goes trotting towards Ulquiorra, beaming. His hair is tousled and bloody and sweaty. His chest is still heaving with panting. He has snapped a few ribs but looks happy. Something lurches weakly in Ulquiorra’s chest.

“We have enough issues around here,” Nelliel says. 

Grimmjow yells, “Wasn’t that too easy?”

Grimmjow’s mistake is turning his back on his opponent. Nnoitra lunges from where he’s fallen. He puts his full power into his next strike and aims at Grimmjow’s _head_ , his mask, and there’s a wrath in his eyes that goes beyond a simple spar. From his hands burns the telltale spark ofGran Rey Cero. It’s forbidden within Las Noches because of its destructive capability. Grimmjow turns — the calculations flicker in Ulquiorra’s mind too fast to follow — and he knows that Grimmjow is responding too slowly. 

Ulquiorra prioritises its speed over strength, so his shot of _cero_ only sends Nnoitra tumbling back instead of tearing him to a thousand pieces and the destruction building in Nnoitra’s hands loses stability and explodes. In the next heartbeat Ulquiorra is there, standing over him. “We are forbidden to use that within Las Noches,” Ulquiorra says. 

Nnoitra coughs, but clearly he’s about to pass out. His eyes keep dilating in and out of focus. He’s smiling.

“Ulquiorra!” Grimmjow explodes behind him. Ulquiorra half-turns, surprised. The anger radiates from Grimmjow in heat-waves. “I _had_ that! I knew he was coming — I was going to defend my position!” 

“You didn’t know,” Ulquiorra replies. He releases the snake and straightens, though he has the sinking awareness that he’s misstepped in some fashion.

“Yeah?” Grimmjow walks right up to him and stares him down. “Do you really think you know what’s going on in my head? Is this your assumption shit again? Are we forgetting that you don’t know anything about people?” 

“You weren’t going to be fast enough,” Nelliel agrees. She lands behind Grimmjow. As tres Espada, she should command even more respect than Ulquiorra. As usual, however, Grimmjow has no respect to give.

“You too?” Grimmjow’s panther-fur stands on end. “ _Fuck_ off. I’m so fucking tired of you looking down on me like I’m scum!” Ulquiorra thinks that this is the quickest combination to get Grimmjow angry. He doesn’t like to admit wrongdoing. He doesn’t like to admit weakness. Moreover, he feels cornered, with two of them against him. “You know I’m stronger than the two of you!”

Ulquiorra _does_ look down on them. He thinks Nnoitra ought to mind his place and he has no respect for Grimmjow when he is throwing a tantrum like this. Suddenly he entertains it as the right thing to do. Grimmjow’s ego has been growing out of control recently. Ulquiorra’s actions have only been feeding it. 

“Then prove it,” Ulquiorra says. He is willing to beat Grimmjow into the ground. If only it would beat some sense into him.

“You’re only down to fight after Nnoitra’s softened me up?” Grimmjow spits a bloody piece into the sand.

He does not rise to the bait. “Later, then,” Ulquiorra says. 

Grimmjow grabs him by the upper arm. Ulquiorra doesn’t fight it off. He looks at it and wonders what it’s supposed to mean. He still hasn’t improved in understanding Grimmjow. Or understanding anyone. “Come here,” Grimmjow says. 

“Ulquiorra,” Nelliel calls after the departing two. “Remember what I said. My door is always open.”

He gives her a nod but doesn’t intend to ever approach her. That makes Grimmjow tighten his grip even more. 

They don’t speak until they arrive at Grimmjow’s chambers. Ulquiorra does not know what to say to curb his anger, so he remains silent even when the handling is rough. He’s unsure if he should stop Grimmjow. Perhaps it’d make Grimmjow more angry. He knows that there’s always a breaking point for anger — a point of no return after which a grudge will be held. He is not sure where Grimmjow’s is. Ulquiorra hasn’t tested the boundaries of his anger. They don’t tend to have arguments. Because their conversations don’t have substance. They cut it off anytime they near dangerous territory. 

Grimmjow pushes him down on his bed and growls somewhere in his throat. Ulquiorra rolls over so he’s face-down as Grimmjow clambers over him and draws lines of red when he digs in too hard. He doesn’t prepare Ulquiorra for penetration. He shoves straight in and rides him like a savage beast, chasing his own pleasure. His kisses across his neck and back are with teeth and slice open his skin. Ulquiorra isn’t hard. He stares at the blankets, on his hands and knees, rocking back on every dry thrust. Grimmjow likes it when he meets his thrusts. Ulquiorra wants him to come quickly, for his madness rage to be over. 

Yet when Grimmjow wraps a thick arm around Ulquiorra’s hip and finds him soft, he stutters and stops. “Ulquiorra?” he says. His voice still has that pushy irritated edge. “You’re not–“

“Of course not,” Ulquiorra says. Grimmjow starts to withdraw, but Ulquiorra grabs his wrist and pulls him back. “It’s fine. Finish.”

“You–“

“ _Do it_ ,” Ulquiorra says because Grimmjow is still hard in him. If this will make Grimmjow think twice about his arrogance and about his refusal to accept that anyone is stronger than him, then Ulquiorra is willing to take the discomfort. The pain is incidental. Ulquiorra has taken more pain in the past. Leaving Grimmjow unsatisfied will be a concoction of trouble. 

Grimmjow grabs him by the waist and thrusts in. It’s no longer angry. Just quick and with purpose. He doesn’t try to kiss Ulquiorra either. He just kneels behind Grimmjow and takes. Somehow that is worse. The repetitiveness of the motion as Ulquiorra stares into the blanket and tries to control his hitched breathing gives him time to think and regret. And it takes a while until Grimmjow spills his seed inside with a muffled groan.

He feels Grimmjow’s weight lift off and away from him.Suddenly Ulquiorra feels terrible. He feels like a glorified whore. He’d told Grimmjow to continue, he reminds himself. He is to blame. 

Still, it’s difficult to keep that tremulous tone out of his voice.He says, “Is this why you pursue sexual-“ not romantic, “-relations with me? To preserve your own sense of power?“ Ulquiorra has no preference between being the penetrator or the one being penetrated. Grimmjow simply moves to take him every time, and because it is what Grimmjow enjoys, Ulquiorra welcomes it. 

“No,” Grimmjow says. His voice isn’t shaking like how Ulquiorra’s legs are. He just sounds confused now. “No. Well. I thought it was _interesting_ to hear you talk. But not this. I wasn’t _that_ angry. You shouldn’t have told me to keep going.”

“That is the motive for the time you spent speaking with me. Then why the sex?” 

Grimmjow seems unwilling to speak, but eventually he unlatches his jaw. “… Because it _feels good_. Why else? And who else would above _sexta_ would’ve agreed to fuck?” The statement seems as crude as it is gutting. Ulquiorra had been so foolish. Grimmjow had always been looking for an Espada numbered above him. “Starrk’s two halves who avoid everybody? Baraggan who’s an old geezer? Nelliel who’d say no? I thought you would be just as stuck-up, so when you were willing to get close — I mean, how could I turn down that offer?” 

There’s blood everywhere, from both Grimmjow’s wounds and his. Many of the drawings on the wall have been stained. Grimmjow watches him from the window, disturbed. 

Ulquiorra gets up from the bed. Grimmjow’s seed, mixed with blood from tearing, runs down his bare legs. He gathers his clothing. The temperature in the room has dropped suddenly.

“Wait.” Grimmjow’s words are all rushed. He closes the distance between them, hands raised like he wants to touch but doesn’t think that he’s welcome. “Stay— Fuck, I shouldn’t have said that. Fuck. Ulquiorra, stay.”

“If I stay, then there’s the possibility that I will be overcome by a sudden bloodlust.” Ulquiorra grabs his picture off the wall and it incinerates in his hand. But his voice remains cold and even. “And with that bloodlust I might open you from thigh to throat and fish out everything inside so I can feed it down your gullet.” He has never experienced this extent of immeasurable, utter, anger. It is so _cold_. “Therefore I think we would both prefer that I did not _stay_.”

Grimmjow doesn’t stop him, but his wide-eyed stare follows him all the way to the door.

Despite the offer from Nelliel, Ulquiorra goes nowhere. He knows that he lost his temper. It’s novel. His thin hands are shaking. He’s made a mistake. Perhaps he should’ve stayed. Perhaps he should’ve let Nnoitra hit Grimmjow. Perhaps he should’ve made Grimmjow stop. Possibilities unfold. Each one harrows him more than the last. If this is a heart, then it has room for regret, and he would be better without one.

The solution, however, is clear. He returns to what he is familiar with. The emptiness. Yes, Grimmjow’s motives for being with him are not out of affection but lustful reality and the desire to bring down those above him. Yes, Ulquiorra should not have told Grimmjow to continue in their coupling. Take those feelings. Take those notions. Forget them. Drown them. In the face of the abyss they are nothing. 

Ulquiorra walks out into the sands. Thinks about the tree. It was a brilliant white. It had more than a thousand branches. Time bent towards it. The sand around it glittered. When Ulquiorra laid himself to rest upon it, his blood did not seem to stain. Beads of red scattered and gathered around his body. His shell cracked like glass. He laid there and looked through its thousand white fingers at the sky. Time passed. He was at peace. A silhouette. Aizen. Another man beside him. Ichimaru. _You poor thing_ , Ichimaru had said. _You can’t die here_ , Aizen had said. They pried his body off the branches and took him away and he never saw the tree again. 

Ulquiorra kneels in the hard sand grains. “Imprison these thoughts of mine, Murciélago.” The release of his resurrecćion is silent. His wings unfurl, great black sails, and his hair flows untamed. His horns spread mast-like. His tattoo-tears darken. Ulquiorra becomes a storm on the sea, a bat of the night, a pirate’s vessel.

His blood rushes through his ears — he can hear everything, every scratch of a hollow within Las Noches, every breath of the Espadas. He can hear Grimmjow’s heartbeat. The world spreads out. He can hear sand grinding ten miles down below his feet. There is where he stores his emotions. He puts them away close to hell. He locks them up and devours the key. They never existed. He cannot allow them to.

*

Ulquiorra has found his equilibrium once more. Under Aizen’s orders, he spends the next few weeks searching for vasto lordes. It’s a simple matter of flying across the rolling sands of Hueco Mundo and watching. Ulquiorra has always enjoyed watching. It is the one skill he was born with, never lacked. In his prison of bone he only had eyes. He swoops into the lowest valleys and highest mountains of stone. He goes far, flies out and out, threatening never to return. It takes him a month, and still there is only white sand. The moon rises and sets and changes its phases. 

He doesn’t find the vasto lorde; it finds him. It shoots some form of cero at him when he is flying and he flips elegantly out of its way. It stands below him in the sand, one arm outstretched and a broad grin spreading its face. It shoots again just as Ulquiorra dives. He folds his wings back and drops like a stone, faster and faster, the wind like thunder in his ears. The cero that shoots parts _around_ him, and he has just the time to see the vasto lorde’s shocked expression before they collide. Ulquiorra’s hand, a dreadful blackened claw, seizes the hollow’s mask and it splinters into millions of pieces. 

Later Ulquiorra brings this vasto lorde to Aizen and it names itself Zommari Rureaux. It undergoes a ritual involving Aizen’s hogyoku to remove more remains of its mask. Aizen praises Ulquiorra after the new arrancar remains on the floor, its mask shattered and its will reshaped, and Ulquiorra kneels in respect while Ichimaru simpers at the king’s side. “Ulquiorra, you ever considered a promotion?” he asks. 

“I am content with my position.”

“You could be cero Espada.” The foxy-faced shinigami speaks with his characteristic lilt. “All you have to do is realise that we _lied_ — your aspect isn’t emptiness. It’s something else.”

“Gin,” Aizen says calmly, but he’s smiling. Aizen’s smiles are always dangerous and so the shinigami falls silent. The other, the blind one, shifts minutely. “You’re dismissed,” he says to Ulquiorra, who rises.

Ichimaru is known for lying. Ulquiorra suspects that every Espada is told the same thing, to urge them to train harder. Those shinigami encourage their conflicts and their battlelusts. It’s… problematic.

There is no possibility that Ulquiorra’s aspect is anything other than emptiness, either way. It feels _right_ to him. It is his natural consequence. Emptiness is the gravity well that his actions are drawn to. Therefore Ulquiorra dismisses Ichimaru’s words. Ichimaru is playing some game again. 

After so long in the desert, Las Noches seems to sit in a new perspective. Its pearly white walls seem unnatural, yet familiar. It sounds of sword-fight, yelling, explosions. It sounds like a rush of sand when the wind blows. Ulquiorra’s shoes carry him lightly across the paths and the sand. He doesn’t intend to stay. He will go search for more vasto lordes. It benefits him, too. It trains him to maintain his resurrecćion form for longer periods of time. It allows him to focus his mind. He is Aizen’s tool. He is a tempered blade of finely-honed steel. Thoughts and ambitions slide away from him like water. Tools have no dreams, nor feelings. Tools are made to be used. He is a focused point. There can be no room for anything else. 

He is emptiness; whatever fills the void can be only momentary. 

He’s already left Las Noches when he feels a ripple of presence and moments later, Grimmjow lands in front of him. “Where’ve you been?” He seems simultaneously annoyed, concerned, and offended, although Ulquiorra cannot be sure.

“I’ve been carrying out Aizen-sama’s orders. You would know this if you asked him.”

“I did. He wouldn’t tell me.” Ulquiorra wonders why that is. He cannot see any motive for Aizen choosing to keep Grimmjow in the dark, except for Aizen disapproving of their relationship and hoping to keep Grimmjow away from Ulquiorra. Yes, that would make sense. Ulquiorra is Aizen-sama’s trusted tool. Grimmjow is a distraction from his task. Grimmjow’s scowl deepens. “Are you leaving again already?”

“Yes.” 

“You owe me a fight.”

In Ulquiorra’s grasp materialises his blade, his soul-cutter. “We will fight, then.”

“How about-” Grimmjow raises his palms. His eyes flicker down to Ulquiorra’s hands. “How about in a month?” 

“You are no longer injured.” Grimmjow clearly wants to keep him in Las Noches. Is it to make an apology? Ulquiorra already knows that Grimmjow does not make apologies. And Grimmjow should know that Ulquiorra does not know how to proceed from apologies. Ulquiorra does not appreciate the underhandedness. “If you wish for a fight, it will be now.”

Grimmjow’s mouth thins. Ulquiorra thinks that this is one of the few times he has seen Grimmjow so hesitant to smile. 

He does not give Grimmjow any more time to consider. He digs a foot into the sand and leaps _over_ Grimmjow. He sees Grimmjow surge up to meet him, _hierro_ thrumming through his skin. Grimmjow does prefer his hand-to-hand combat and stopping strikes with his bare hands. But it won’t be enough. Layered with reistsu folded back again and again in thousands of precise layers, Ulquiorra’s blade isn’t stopped. It bites into Grimmjow’s flesh and draws blood; Grimmjow has the time to look startled. 

“ _Imprison,_ ” Ulquiorra says, meeting Grimmjow’s too-blue eyes. His wings unfold like they intend to span the sky. He twists his blade so that instead of severing Grimmjow’s arm, it peels, horizontally, all up his arm and flaying the muscle, stopping at the shoulder. 

“ _Grind_!” Grimmjow calls for his resurrecćion. It’s too late. Ulquiorra grabs his face — inelegant — and hurls it downwards. He feels nothing even though he’s hurting him. Grimmjow hits the sand and sprays it everywhere. The desert itself ripples with the shockwave. Ulquiorra, a black bullet, wind shrieking around him, hits _him_ a moment after. He can feel Grimmjow’s internals fail to keep up with the surge in pressure. Blood sprays from his mouth when they rupture and Ulquiorra’s planted a hand against his chest to keep him from doing something so foolish as attempt to rise again. 

Ulquiorra’s gaze is icy. “We are legions and _legions_ apart, Grimmjow.” He crouches beside his opponent, whose eyelashes flutter weakly. “It’s in your best interests not to resort to deceit with me. What did you want?” 

He watches Grimmjow’s hand raise with some wariness. Surely Grimmjow has too much honour to attempt to a Gran Rey Cero. The upturned palm merely rests against Ulquiorra’s pale cheek. It’s warm and familiar. His insides would be knitting together now. Grimmjow’s eyes dance across his features. He seems to be thinking deeply. “Can I kiss you?” he asks, raspy.

All this song and dance just for a kiss? Ulquiorra’s gaze drops to Grimmjow’s lips. “For your ego?” he asks.

“No.” Grimmjow wears an expression as though he’s pained to admit it. 

His will wavers. He _could_ fraternise with Grimmjow… as long as he remembers where he stands. As long as he doesn’t pursue as naively as before. He doesn’t mean anything to Grimmjow — not right now. He has to remember that. So Ulquiorra kisses him, feather-soft, trying to feel nothing. Grimmjow deepens it with enthusiasm. He fists his hands in Ulquiorra’s long hair. Their resurrecćions and the sand, kissing. Grimmjow’s mouth is wet and warm and dangerous and alive, and his fangs keep cutting his lips. Grimmjow’s hands roam beneath his jacket, undo his sash, and dip beneath his hakama to splay across his skin. 

They end up coupling there, in the sand, Ulquiorra riding Grimmjow to completion with Grimmjow’s tail pushed between his lips. When they’re done Ulquiorra pants against Grimmjow’s chest and Grimmjow grabs Ulquiorra’s jacket to cover him. Eventually, however, Ulquiorra peels himself away and Grimmjow doesn’t try to stop him. He doesn’t try to reach out. He lets him go on his mission for Aizen. He’s sated. He’d gotten what he wanted from Ulquiorra. Somehow that stings, in a distant, muted and throbbing way.

*

There is something Ulquiorra would not like to admit. 

The blue in Grimmjow’s eyes is a shade unseen anywhere in Hueco Mundo. Ulquiorra could list all these other shades of blue: azure, capri, cerulean, cobalt, cyan, electric, ice, indigo, teal, navy, neon, ultramarine — but they are too mundane. Grimmjow’s blue is a blue of a bright light against fingers pressed to tightly shut eyelids, vivid and yet utterly intangible and indescribable until the moment Grimmjow turns his gaze upon him. 

In mundane terms Ulquiorra imagines others could describe him as fit, attractively tall, outrageously coloured and stylishly messy, but Ulquiorra has this _memory_ of him, this absolute replica in his mind where Grimmjow’s skin is like honey laid over rippling strength and is so steady that he seems like an axiom, and he smells like sweat and blood and sand, and his body is warmer than a sunny shore and his eyelashes beat like wings and his hair is tousled like sea-foam and those eyes are ice and the lines of his body promise power in the basest of ways.

Ulquiorra remembers Grimmjow as this sculpture of absolutes and moments of memory. And sometimes when Ulquiorra looks at him he loses what pulse he has, because Grimmjow is someone’s ideal made incarnate — grinning, devilish, a handsome rogue.

Ulquiorra tries to keep these feelings and thoughts at the bottom of the desert. But they rise as an ocean all the same. For all his power, for all his ritual stoicism, he is helpless. 

This is what he would not like to admit. This is what he buried at the stone-cold feet of Hueco Mundo. If this is a heart, then tear his out. 

*

Ulquiorra returns from his one-week search more tired than usual, having flown through the perpetual storms in the western swathes of desert. It had been good training for his endurance. He touches down on the outer wall of Hueco Mundo and shakes sand out from his sleeves. His attention turns outward. There is movement out beyond the wall. A tiny hollow runs around, shouting. It looks familiar. When he sees the green hair and the skull, along with the two fracćion members, the suspicion settles. That is Nelliel racing through the desert in a child-like form. She’s laughing. That’s rare. 

Disabling one of their members is not beneficial for the Espada as a whole. Ulquiorra could attempt to restore her by feeding reiatsu into her mask, but he is uncertain if it would work, and her shouts of pure, unadulterated joy lend him pause. He knows she will be safe out here. Those with a grudge on her want the boasting rights of killing her only at her full strength. Moreover, there are two hollows to take care of her. She had never enjoyed their life as Aizen’s tools.

He decides it is for the better. He can always change his mind later. As little right as he has to make that choice for her, he suspects that if there ever comes a day where she is truly needed, she will find the strength to revert.

As he’s turning away he sees another arrancar watching Nelliel. He’s blonde, with an eyepatch. The covered eye is how Ulquiorra makes the connection, though the arrancar is clearly weak because he flinches when Ulquiorra appears behind him. “You are?” Ulquiorra asks, flatly. 

“Tesra Lindocruz,” the arrancar replies, clever enough not to lie. He tries to put distance between them. He must recognise Ulquiorra. 

“Nnoitra’s fracćion?”

“Yes. His only.” Lindocruz remains respectful, using formal speech.

It confirms Ulquiorra’s suspicion. While Ulquiorra was gone, Nnoitra has _disposed_ of Nelliel. “Your power squabbles are foolish.” Ulquiorra floods his reiatsu out towards the arrancar, who visibly pales. “You endanger us all. Remember that the next time you aid your Espada.”

With that, he leaves into Las Noches. Aizen awaits his report. Ulquiorra crushes his eye and the king of Hueco Mundo scans through the flickering images. Neither of them find anything of interest, though Aizen tells him to stay in Las Noches for a while. He has an important job for Ulquiorra soon and wants him on hand.

So Ulquiorra goes to his tower and stands at the window, thinking of storms and Nelliel and being a child with no worries. It’s Grimmjow who comes to find him. He appears in the window, as beautiful as ever. His movement is like a swimmer’s. It’s exquisitely slow and graceful as he approaches. It’s deliberate and controlled and seamlessly silent until the moment he steps into the bubble of Ulquiorra’s consciousness and surfaces from the depthless deep dripping with water and pulls Ulquiorra to him as though threaded on a hook.

Ulquiorra falls for it. For him. Hook, line, sink into the abyss.

And afterward their breathless coupling, Ulquiorra lies staring at the pointless ceiling while Grimmjow has an arm under his head and the other absently scratches his belly. Grimmjow yawns and tucks his nose deeper into Ulquiorra’s hair. He always sleeps on his right side so that Ulquiorra’s horn isn’t in the way, a hot line of muscle pressed against him. “Damn,” Grimmjow says. The scratching arm splays over Ulquiorra’s bare torso instead. It dances lightly across the contour of his hip-bones and the pale dip of his stomach. 

He doesn’t follow up with that comment. Ulquiorra doesn’t know what it’s supposed to mean. Is it meant to be admiring? There is very little that is admirable about Ulquiorra’s body. He’s skinny and lean. He thinks Grimmjow enjoys how foldable he is. Ulquiorra is no resistance. Perhaps that is what Grimmjow likes. Through all his fighting, he wants something easy. Ulquiorra is easy. 

He stares, face blank, upwards. If the ceiling were a face he’d reach into its plaster eyes and gouge them out. It sees nothing. He sees nothing.

He should ask. Grimmjow wouldn’t care. What am I. What am I to you. What is this? He already asked. The answer was clear. Something pleasurable. The answer upset him. Ulquiorra just keeps hoping it’d be a different answer. So he wouldn’t have to box these feelings away — try to fight them, helplessly. 

Fingers dip beneath the blanket. Ulquiorra makes a brief noise when they wrap around him and pull him to hardness. Grimmjow’s gaze is a tangible thing, all over his skin. Ulquiorra doesn’t know where to put his hands. He clutches the blanket, then reaches for Grimmjow’s shoulders. He can feel the muscles beneath the skin shifting. But the position makes him face Grimmjow. He’s being watched, so he closes his eyes. Pleasure is a rising thing in him even though he’d come not long ago. It snakes through his veins. He feels so exposed. Maybe he trembles from fear.

“You’re hot like this,” Grimmjow says and that statement stings because it reminds him that’s what Grimmjow sees him for. Grimmjow claims Ulquiorra’s mouth in something messy and aggressive and demanding. Ulquiorra’s broken moan sounds like a whimper into it. He feels like the waves are too high. He’s been caught in a current under the intensity of Grimmjow, locked back from matching — if he gets closer he’ll burn. Instead, he’s swept away. 

He feels threatened. Grimmjow enjoys it. Grimmjow thinks he’s overwhelmed by the physical sensations alone. They’re a distant roar in his mind. Everything is centred onto the wetness between their mouths and Grimmjow’s insistent tongue. When he comes, his breathy awkward noise is swallowed immediately. Grimmjow uses both hands to grasp Ulquiorra’s face and deepen the kiss more. He rolls them over so that he can grind down on Ulquiorra. Ulquiorra can feel the heat of his arousal. Grimmjow’s hard again, and with that, they break apart briefly for Ulquiorra to be entered again. Being face to face is too intense. 

Outwardly, Ulquiorra’s almost expressionless. His breath’s quick and he’s flushed, and he’s clutching onto Grimmjow’s wrists, but as Grimmjow holds his gaze too long he does close his eyes again. He feels the kisses rained down on him. He feels Grimmjow thrusting into him, deep and rhythmic and hypnotic. It’s raw and too visceral. 

Grimmjow must think, again, that it’s the sensation. But it’s the sense of vulnerability. He feels splayed out and shown beneath Grimmjow. It’s so much. Can’t Grimmjow see his heart here, through the hole in his throat? It’s right there, caught there on words he won’t say. It beats and it bleeds. 

If only he wasn’t a conquest. If only. But he is. He’s a bed-warmer and a conquest and he can’t stop coming back. He’s addicted to this sensation, to the feeling of Grimmjow giving him his utmost attention and being under that warm-sea gaze and hold. Something that started off as merely _something_ has become indescribably important and muscle-memory. How idiotic is that — that Ulquiorra, of all people, would feel like this.

Grimmjow comes, a long wet spurt inside of him, still twitching, and Ulquiorra feels it keenly. When he pulls out to flop next to Ulquiorra, Ulquiorra’s entrance flutters. Grimmjow makes a satisfied noise from the back of his throat. Ulquiorra stares upwards again even though he wants to see Grimmjow’s sated expression. Grimmjow’s seed is still in him. Ulquiorra should ask. But he already did. Didn’t he? Why don’t I mean more to you? How could you say ‘it’s just because it feels good’ with such flippancy?

He should. He can’t. Doesn’t want to hear it again. Ulquiorra: taciturn, a conquest, too easy, a failure, caught somewhere in the dark, the senselessness, and his own head. He’s always been caught in his own head. The shell’s still there, and no more branch nor spear to crucify himself upon. 

*

Only in the absolute darkness of the night when Grimmjow is snoring and asleep does Ulquiorra let his tension fall away. He touches Grimmjow’s face softly and thinks of how beautiful he is. Nothing in Ulquiorra’s world is as _alive_. Nothing else makes him _feel_ so much. Even looking at him, the fan of his eyelashes, the slant of his cheekbone and jaw and the angle of his shut eyes can evoke instantly this gut-deep churning feeling. In that moment he is convinced that Grimmjow _is_ his tree, radiant, bleached-bone coral under the ocean to which Ulquiorra sacrifices himself for happiness — happiness that he grasps only momentarily and will never have again. 

In some other world Grimmjow would wake up, Ulquiorra imagines. In some other world Grimmjow would just be feigning sleep. In some other world he would realise Ulquiorra’s too-deep devotion for him, and instead of rejecting it he would entertain it and find himself also in love. 

But Grimmjow isn’t awake. He doesn’t wake up. He wouldn't accept it. This isn’t that world. Ulquiorra withdraws his hand, and longs. 

He will only look, instead, and hurt himself with thoughts of things that cannot be.

*

After so many years, Ulquiorra disobeys Aizen’s orders. He walks out into the desert for no motive, no mission, until he can’t see the white walls of Las Noches. The sand stretches for eons. It ripples in the wind like an ocean under the sun. 

Under the water, under the sea he sees in his head, there’s some _thing_ , pale and pasty white. All those bottled emotions. It’s a body. Its chest is a mess of glistening rib-bones and open cavities and blood and intestines and its head is a tangle of hair and brain. It’s eroded and bloated and pale. He thought he’d drowned it before. He’d pulled it down into the inky blackness like a falling stone but it’s floated up again. It won’t stay down. 

He shouldn’t be feeling this. He should be empty. Why can’t he stay empty? Why did he start this with Grimmjow? He’d thought Grimmjow saw something in him, at first— but he realises now that whatever thoughtfulness Grimmjow had for him was reserved only for the chase. Now that he has Ulquorra at his beck and call, he is taken for granted. Yet Ulquiorra can’t seem to make himself more sparse nor leave.

He’s picking at his hands, he realises — trying to peel them away, as though if he sees his insides he'll understand how they work. Doesn’t understand anything. He’s feeling this, damnit, it’s everywhere, this feeling that arrests him like the song of a siren and will grab him in decaying hands and drown him.

If there is a god– why? Ulquiorra whispers this prayer to himself. Damn you if this is your will.If this is your hand damn you. Do you have a throat to be strangled from? Do you have a heart to be broken or a soul to be crushed? Because all of these I do. Curse you eternally.

Even Aizen is only a king — even the Soul King is only a king and none of them reign supreme. None of them govern fate and there are no answers from them. Even if Ulquiorra had the power to storm their castles and tear them down from their thrones, bleeding at his feet, they’d have no answers for him. God has no face. There _is_ no answering fate. There _is_ no enemy to kill to solve because _it’s all him_. The problem’s all in his own head — the cracked muscle-skull of his head trying to eat its way out from the inside. 

Oh, god, the body’s washed up at shore, and it’s not just a body. It’s him, smelling like rot and suicide and waiting for meat-eaters to feast.

The scream builds up in his throat. It claws out of him with a soul-deep hate, fury, despair — blackening despair, so thick and choking like tar. 

How callous is it that your love goes out into the void just like that— like you’ve chosen wrong, it’s displaced, it’s out there and it’s reaching for something but there’s nothing- nothing, nothing, just this great echo of nothing that comes back, but _not_ nothing— it forms the shape of something you lost. That you lost and do not have and will never get back and will never have again. 

Blood pours from the gape of a hole in his body. It runs down his eyes and across the leather of his wings that tauten and expand. The bones split out from his fingers into talons. In the middle of nowhere, when he loathes it, he ascends into a higher form of his resurrecćion. 

He takes into the air at such speeds that he feels the shockwave ripple out as the sound barrier crumples. How can he feel so terrible? Why? Why does his chest always feel tight like he can’t breathe- like he’s at the bottom of the world, like he’s lost something that can’t be fixed- why can’t he outrun it? The stars are like hail, or maybe it’s the lack of air, the thinning atmosphere, the world distending like sunlight underwater. He flies desperately, faster, faster, but the surface is so damn far, or maybe he’s going deeper. He can see shapes moving on the surface but maybe that’s the blood bursting along the surface of his retina and maybe that’s his mouth opening to gasp for air. Where in the world is he, how can he always be so lost? He claws at himself — if only he could tear this all away, rip it like a skin, ribbons of blood left behind him for sharks to follow. 

He rips open a hole in Hueco Mundo, pierces through Dangai and the Valley of Screams like a fired harpoon, reality burning around him as he goes _beyond_ , into a vast and endless void that is either space or the bottom of the ocean where souls go at their absolute end of times and the humans will whisper about a tsunami off the coast of japan and Soul Society looks down at the tremor of an earthquake.

What he doesn’t see and can’t ever comprehend within the plane of his existence is that, like a fish leaping from a pond, he surfaces from space-time and for the briefest moment crosses into another reality entirely, where things do not walk, and spirits do not return but end forever, and lives are not planned but free to wander and colossal things that move unlike living things cast shadows that span galaxies that are filled with light. 

Then the laws of space-time and gravity and the hands of gods catch him and view him along six dimensions and turn him inside out before they throw him back into his place. Plunge into his rockpool, his tiny world. Into his controlled and understandable ecosystem. Sink into Hueco Mundo — back into insignificance.

He doesn’t realise it but he is left with the understanding, the impression, like the vestiges of a nightmare— that the gods had seen him and then returned him to his place like a minnow and forgot his appearance, forgot his despair, forgot about him entirely. They never understood his prayer. They heard his last plea and didn’t care and put him back. 

When he falls he’s barely recognisable. 

His wide-eyed blood staring blind with broken wings and open bone: his second resurrecćion because he’s died for a second time. Later he names it _True Despair._

*

“Aren’t you a sorry state.” 

The moon is high in the sky. It’s day. Ichimaru is looking down at him. _You poor thing_ he seems to be saying gain.

“Don’t worry your little head. I won’t tell Aizen-sama.”

Ulquiorra lies in the sand. His wings are bent and bleeding. He’s been lying there as the moon passed overhead not once but twice. He’s surpressed his reiatsu so it won’t heal his injuries.

“Oh, but it’s not like it’s a _secret_. They probably felt that all the way in Las Noches.” Ichimaru laughs. “We didn’t know you’d turn out exactly like _this_ , though.”

Tear out his heart. Aren’t hollows not supposed to have hearts?

“I have a secret for you.” The moon is blotted out by Ichimaru’s silhouette. “You aren’t a hollow. Unlike the rest of them you weren’t ever human. That’s why you’re different. That’s probably why you don’t understand the rest of them. We made you. Well — we made all of you by taking off your masks, but you’re different. All the memories you have are planted.”

It doesn’t matter if Ichimaru’s lying. If they created him he feels no obligation to them. 

And he must be a hollow. Everything’s hollow inside. Emptiness. Where’s his emptiness that was so comforting and familiar? Reaching for it is like trying to hold water. 

“Your aspect isn’t emptiness. You’re the strongest emotion we could easily make.” Through his eyes, Ichimaru’s mouth shapes the words very slowly. “You’re _heartbreak_. It’s not that surprising you went to repression. You’re designed that way. You feel so much that the only way for you to cope is to feel nothing. Isn’t that a little poetic?”

It matters nothing if he’s lying. 

“We didn’t think you’d go for _Grimmjow_. We all bet it to be Nelliel.” Ichimaru seems to find this amusing. He’s smiling. That cuts through Ulquiorra’s haze. He doesn’t want to hear anymore. Ichimaru has come to mock him and tell him that Ulquiorra has always been destined for failure. If he was— what does it matter? It makes his emotions and his efforts no less true nor visceral. “But–“

Ulquiorra snaps up so quickly that Ichimaru barely dodges. It catches the edge of his hair. “Okay,” he says, still smiling, but the threat of Ulquiorra’s state is clear. “I’ll get someone else.”

Ulquiorra knows who that someone else will be but he doesn’t have the will to move. Perhaps the sand will eat him up if he chooses not to move. Under the spine of time he’ll be buried. 

Grimmjow arrives by nighttime. His approach a few miles away is given away by him cursing out Ichimaru for giving shitty directions. Ulquiorra had shed his resurecćion before Ichimaru even found him but still hasn’t mustered the effort to allow himself to heal. Maybe he can bleed out all this sadness in him. It’s sadness — the others tended to call him melancholy. He’d thought he was empty. In this moment he can agree that it’s sadness. He’s so terribly miserable that it takes up too much space inside him and pushes his other organs out of place.

“What the fuck is this,” Grimmjow says. He sounds unimpressed. Ulquiorra had hoped it wouldn’t be him even though it was inevitable. 

When Grimmjow realises there’ll be no reply he sighs in a heavy and exaggerated manner. He crouches down next to Ulquiorra. 

“Did someone beat you up? Was it Starrk? I’ll beat his ass.”

For Ulquiorra it is nigh impossible to lie so instead he chooses to remain silent. He knows he looks a mess. His body is a bevy of injuries and skin and blood and gore.

“I didn’t take you for someone who’d mope. Why aren’t you healing?” The furrow between Grimmjow’s eyebrows shows slight genuine concern. Ulquiorra can recognise this now. He’s spent a long time looking at Grimmjow’s face. “I’m not gonna carry you, you know.”

He sits down into the sand and wears a resolute stern look. It doesn’t take long to fade into a scowl. Ulquiorra don’t think the anger is genuine. Anger is Grimmjow’s catch-all — and his mask. 

“Oh, whatever.” The ground lifts away. Ulquiorra feels hesitantly small and breakable in his arms. He should feel safer, but he doesn’t. But he does feel the steady beat of Grimmjow’s heart by his ear. And he can see Grimmjow’s poorly concealed glances of worry. Maybe this is all he can get, and maybe with this, he should be happy, but instead he feels broken. Stitched together with pity. 

*

The passing of time is inconsequential to him. His feelings do not change. Their relationship is always a push and pull. The sea is always rough. He continues to see Grimmjow and they continue to have sex. There are no ‘dates’. There is no favouritism. There are no grand gestures of love. These days, they simply sleep, fuck, and then go their separate ways. 

Their scouting missions are nearing a close. Most realistically reachable areas of Hueco Mundo they’ve already searched. They don’t go past the black sea — a sea that, several months of travelling in a straight line out, can be reached from Las Noches. It corrodes any material that it touches and although Ulquiorra has tentatively flown out until he could not see the shore, he had seen no land on the horizon. Aizen had made the executive decision not to cross. It could lead to other places they knew nothing of, he’d said. 

The number of hollows in Hueco Mundo and shinigami in Soul Society aren’t reflective of the total world population. Cumulatively, there have been over a hundred billion humans. If every nine of ten souls went to soul society, ninety nine billion souls would’ve tread through there. If seven billion are in circulation now, there are still tens of billions that need to be housed there. Ulquiorra’s been told that there are two humans dying every second. A hundred and four every minute. Thirteen shinigami squads alone wouldn’t be able to handle the processing of that. There is bound to be a larger world, perhaps not geographically, but folded within the reaches of space. The thought of it is vaguely intriguing, even to him. 

How _they_ have come to be feels— oddly artificial, as though they are a test case, small enough to keep track of yet large enough to contain its own systems. 

Nonetheless, the last of places for them to search for vasto lordes — within their reaches — are in a small underground complex of caves where several hollow villages are known to live.

Grimmjow’s loud mouth consistently lands him in trouble. Across the meeting table he opens it to laugh at Nnoitra’s suggestion. “Why the hell would we take their tunnels? They’re all gonna be trapped up and down! Just blast a hole from the surface and be done with it!” 

Nnoitra stands, his tongue flashing out snake-like. “I challenge you, then.” He glances over briefly at Aizen, who waves at him to go ahead. 

“For one fucking idea?”Grimmjow rises slowly to match.

“For your place, numero _sexta_.” 

The void in numbers that Nelliel had left hasn’t been filled completely. Harribel took her place from fifth as third. Ulquiorra chose not to challenge. He recalls his second form, True Despair. He remembers Grimmjaw looking down. Remembers following his gaze to his hip where the was no number.Perhaps it _could not_ be numbered. But power matters very little to him.

Nnoitra is still eighth, but from what Ulquiorra’s heard, he’s been gaining power rapidly. He wants the now-empty fifth spot. Around the table Starrk and Lilynette stifle simultaneous yawns. Harribel coolly observes. Zommari leans back in his chair. It’s Baraggan who asks if they’re dismissed. Aizen allows them to leave, and most of the Espada file out. 

Ulquiorra stays. So does Harribel. Szayelaporro looks excited and licks his lips as the reiatsu in the room begins to build, like gas and pressure. The fight starts quick, brutal, Grimmjow leaping over the table to close the distance between them like lightning to ground. But Nnoitra’s curved blade materialises between them and he spins it in his hands. The fluidity of its path seems to surprise Grimmjow, because he leaps back hissing an indrawn breath between gritted teeth. 

If Nnoitra wins this, then Szayelaporro gains the eighth spot, given that he accepts the offer to be moved up, unlike Ulquiorra. Others can still choose to challenge. It’s a system that Ulquiorra has never bothered learning the nuances of. He wants to be high enough to be respected and left alone, yet he does not want to be so high to be challenged by the egotistical. 

Across the table Grimmjow slashes for Nnoitra’s throat, but Nnoitra ducks under the swing and slides a blade into Grimmjow’s stomach with a wet crunch. Regeneration kicks in. Nnoitra turns the metal like a screw. Grimmjow sinks his teeth into Nnoitra’s shoulder and lacerates it.Nnoitra catches Grimmjow’s throat with his blade. Ulquiorra can feel himself dissociating from the scene. There’s blood dripping from Grimmjow’s mouth. He’s watching from a stranger’s body, aware already that Grimmjow is going to lose. But he will not interfere. It is Grimmjow’s fight. Each slash, each fire of _cero_ , plays in his mind on a reel. 

Grimmjow loses the lower half of his face in a blast and it’s still knitting together as sinew and tendon when Nnoitra sticks his fingers into it and wrenches it out of place. Grimmjow snarls, but it sounds more like a gurgle. Ulquiorra feels like his own insides and emotions are too large for his body, choking from the inside. Don’t interfere.

Szayelaporro has an eager gleam in his eye. Harribel is attentive but unmoved. Aizen and Ichimaru are smiling up on the dias. Tōsen stands stoically beside them. Grimmjow is slammed into the table, which shatters, and Ulquiorra can hear Aizen’s tutting at the destruction of furniture. Ulquiorra is fixed on the reduced rate of Grimmjow’s regeneration. He’s already having trouble holding onto his resurrecćion. His fur fades into bloodied skin at places. Nnoitra is still intact. 

Then one of his many arms rips Grimmjow’s chest open like he’s a too-ripe corpse. Inside it’s all liquid red and moist bone and Nnoitra plunges his hands into Grimmjow’s intestines. They begin to dig in like vultures, clutching fleshy organs beating.

At this rate Grimmjow will die. Ulquiorra sits still, expecting Aizen to step in. The king of Hueco Mundo meets his look and, very slightly, smiles. Ulquiorra is uncomfortably aware of the sound of Grimmjow’s blood squelching in the room. Grimmjow’s struggling is leaking as he’s being mauled from the inside. Nnoitra is bloodied up to the elbows. If Ulquiorra interferes, Grimmjow will be upset. He will fail whatever test Aizen is setting him. He will lose further honour. Nnoitra will target Grimmjow in the future, just to target Ulquiorra — since now he will be fifth, just beneath Ulquiorra. 

Even watching Grimmjow be harmed like this requires his will being sealed behind walls hundred of layers thick. Nnoitra’s got Grimmjow’s insides in his hands. He’s smiling. Somehow that’s what tips Ulquiorra over: the smile. Grimmjow is the one who ought to be smiling. _Grimmjow_ is always smiling in that wicked way of his when he’s fighting. _He_ deserves to be happy. Ulquiorra barely registers Nnoitra’s lips forming the words _cero_ — unmissable. Fatal. 

Harribel stops Ulquiorra from needing to make a choice. The wall explodes when she grabs Nnoitra and removes him from Grimmjow in an instant. He gives her a wink and a lecherous grin and lets his gaze fall to the underside of her breasts. She hits him. Ulquiorra can hear someone, one of the other Espada, laughing in the distance. 

There is too much blood surrounding Grimmjow. Ulquiorra hadn’t even realised that he’d closed the distance between them. He’d done it as soon as Nnoitra had been about to deliver that fatal blow. He tries to put Grimmjow’s organs back into place. He surrounds him with reiatsu. For a blinding moment he thinks he sees Grimmjow’s heart stop but then he blinks and it continues. His hands are covered in Grimmjow’s blood. It’s terrifyingly warm. It’s hardly real. What if it goes cold?

“Oh, that’s cute,” Nnoitra says. He’s rubbing his cheek. Harribel towers over him, but he looks past her and at Ulquiorra. “ _That’s_ what you let between your legs, Ulquiorra? You might as well let me!” He thrusts his hips upwards, grinding against Harribel. He’s hard from the fight. She hits him again, and this time she curls her fingers into the hole in his skull until it bleeds and holds him some distance away. 

Ulquiorra does not respond. He picks Grimmjow up, as gently as he can, looks to Aizen for permission, and when it’s given, takes him away. 

He hands Grimmjow’s body over to his own fracćion and then waits outside the door, standing still, completely blank, for several hours before they allow him in. Then he sits by his bedside and remains there with his head in his hands — everything’s going wrong — until Grimmjow does wake.

*

Grimmjow is, understandably, angry. “How the fuck did he beat me?” he croaks, upon regaining consciousness. 

“Don’t sit up,” Ulquiorra says, placing a hand on his shoulder. Grimmjow bats it away. Ulquiorra, strung, resolves not to touch him again when it’ll anger him. 

“Who the fuck put me into a fucking bed? I’m not gonna be stuck in a _bed._ I’m gonna go out there and beat the shit out of that damn snake.” He winces when he tries to move, though. Ulquiorra watches on in disapproval. 

“You’re injured, Grimmjow.”

“Yeah, I can see that. I’m not _blind_ , Ulquiorra, and I can definitely _feel_.” His tone is acerbic. His eyes are narrowed. “Did you whisk me out of there? Did _Harribel_ have to stop Nnoitra? Did I die like a worm in front of Aizen and his rubbish shinigami friends?”

Ulquiorra says nothing. His lips press into a flat, displeased, line. Grimmjow knows what that means. 

“You must think I’m so fucking embarrassing,” Grimmjow accuses. 

“No. I have seen … weaker things.”

“God, fuck you.” That’s entirely vitriol, now. “I hope someone wipes that superior fucking look off your face. How do _you_ feel when someone beats you into the ground? Huh? Oh, I’m sorry, no one beats _you_.”

“Grimmjow,” Ulquiorra says, slightly sadly. He’d hoped for more level-headedness. 

“Don’t give me your pity. It’s disgusting.”

Something awful settles in Ulquiorra’s chest. How is Grimmjow so capable of making him feel like this? Perhaps he should leave. Grimmjow’s fracćion members might be able to appease him instead.

Something in his expression must give him away because Grimmjow’s mood changes. He covers his face with a hand. 

“Wow. Fuck fuck _FUCK_!” He slams the headboard with his fist. “I’m being such a bastard.” He parts his fingers and looks at Ulquiorra. “Come here.”

Ulquiorra is tempted to leave, but he can never deny Grimmjow. He hesitantly smoothes the blanket and sidles onto the bed, silent. 

“Don’t look like that,” Grimmjow says. He pulls Ulquiorra closer to him. Ulquiorra is accustomed to the heat of his body, now. On familiarity, his own relaxes. Grimmjow pushes his nose into Ulquiorra’s hair. Even the pressure of his face against him is too soothing.

“Whatever,” Grimmjow mutters lowly under his breath. “Just– whatever. Fuck it.”

Ulquiorra cannot fight Grimmjow’s battles for him. He is helpless in this situation, as he tends to be when it concerns Grimmjow. He says, “Your position is not everything.”

“Maybe.” Grimmjow’s arm tightens around him. “I don’t know. I _can’t_. For some reason I can’t stop it meaning something to me,” he says, and sounds so utterly bewildered in that moment that Ulquiorra realises he’s not alone. They’re both blind and fumbling around. Maybe they won’t ever find each other. Maybe they’ll walk right past each other in the dark, thinking they’re someplace else, refusing to speak, held back by pride, by propriety, and by fear of whatever else is listening in the long dark. 

They don’t speak after that. Grimmjow falls back asleep. 

*

“Anyone with half a brain can see you’re enamoured with him, you know.”

Ulquiorra simply looks up, unimpressed. He’d been waiting out in the sands for a while. He’d known Nnoitra would come if he left the walls of Las Noches.

“I only have half the usual eyes,” Nnoitra laughs, “and even _I_ can see it. Do you know even the Privaron Espada like to gossip about you two?” 

“That doesn’t concern me.”

“No,” Nnoitra smiles knowingly, as though that was exactly what he expected of Ulquiorra. “Nothing really does, does it? I heard you didn’t even _try_ to take Nelliel’s spot. So how about you just hand over yours?”

Ordinarily, Ulquiorra wouldn’t care. But he feels this alien sensation in him, bubbling. At first he thinks it’s spite. Then he thinks it’s anger, or his sense of honour. “I left Las Noches deliberately, Nnoitra.”

“Hm?” His snake tongue darts out, tasting the air, and senses no ambush. ”Trying to take me away from your weak little boy?”

“Because _cuatro_ and above-“ his voice builds as though echoing in a chamber, “-are not permitted to release their forms within.”

His _cero_ doesn’t throw Nnoitra across the sand — not because it wasn’t strong enough — but because Ulquiorra dashes behind him before it connects and impales him on his hand. Nnoitra manages to release his resurrecćion in time to avoid being incinerated, but Ulquiorra rips his spine out of his body in one sharp movement. Nnoitra’s blood sprays all over his clothes and strings of muscle tangle in his fingers. One of his arms flails for Ulquiorra, but Ulquiorra just seizes it and shoves it back into Nnoitra’s own stomach. It’s wet and brutal, and so bloody, and nothing is beating in his veins except this coldness.

“You test me, trash,” Ulquiorra says. Nnoitra makes a choked sound. His pelvis isn’t connected to his spine by any bone. It’s just a taut slab of flesh, his abdomen, holding his legs in place. “Touch what’s mine and I will gut you and hang you from the walls of Las Noches.”

He pulls his arm out. It releases with a wet suction from Nnoitra’s chest and the Espada collapses. Nnoitra will not die. Perhaps he will be out here, flesh knitting together, for a few weeks, but not fatally. He has always had great regeneration ability. Moreover, Ulquiorra can see his fracćion — Tesra, he remembers — hurrying through the gates of Las Noches. 

“Nnoitra!” Ulquiorra hears him shout, despairing. “ _No_! Why did you hurt him?”

“ _You know why_ ,” Ulquiorra replies, steel-cold, tempted to turn Nnoitra inside-out until the back of his eyeballs feel the cold wind and the inside of his nails are exposed. If this Tesra cares for Nnoitra then he will understand. “If you value his life, do not come near us again.“

*

One fracćion member that Ulquiorra runs into frequently is Yylfordt, because he is a part of Grimmjow’s and because with Grimmjow’s injury, Ulquiorra is now often in his territory. “Cuatro-sama,” Yylfordt says, instinctively falling into a kneel whenever he sees Ulquiorra. Ulquiorra quickly learns that he is the brother to Szayelaporro Granz. The ‘brother’ of the eighth Espada, the scientist among them who experiments on his fracćion to make them into fodder so that he can absorb them. Ulquiorra had never been familiar with that familial relation — hadn’t even known Szayelaporro had a sibling — and he hadn’t identified Yylfordt’s position until now. 

It is quite curious. “You are Grimmjow’s fracćion.” Ulquiorra says, one day when they meet in Grimmjow’s hallways, after Grimmjow has fallen asleep and Ulquiorra has to respond to Aizen’s summons. “Why aren’t you a part of your brother’s?”

“Well, the one who sealed me as an adjucha and travelled with me was Grimmjow, so I’m honour bound to him. And I’m familiar with him! He really grows on you after a while.”

“Why not travel with your brother?”

“I hadn’t met him yet. We met only in Las Noches, and I am glad to have someone like him as my brother.”

“Then how do you know you are siblings?”

“We just knew.” Yylfordt’s eyes are imploring. He is a very expressive individual. Frankly, it disturbs Ulquiorra. “When we met… we both _felt_ it. I felt it in my soul. We were connected. We each were _part_ of each other. I had to protect him with the full extent of my love and soul, the type that only an older brother feels.”

Ulquiorra frowns. It doesn’t sound like brotherhood to him, but he knows nothing of families. He surmises, “You aren’t in his fracćion because his fracćion are experiments and disposables, and because you are not that.” _To him_ goes unsaid.

Yylfordt hesitates. “That’s a part of it, yes.” When he sees Ulquiorra’s narrow look, he hurriedly explains. “Szayelaporro doesn’t like to talk about that,” he laughs. “I guess we have to hide it. He says other people will use it against him, and honestly, he’s right! It just seems to be like that around here. Love someone and it gets used against you.”

*

The sedentary life does not suit Grimmjow. He is itching to leave and antsy within days of being bed-ridden. It doesn’t help that Aizen has ordered Ulquiorra out to the human world. “It is not entertainment,” Ulquiorra says, for the fifth time. 

“It’s better than being _stuck_ here.”

“You are recovering.” Ulquiorra would rather see Grimmjow outside, too, simply because that makes Grimmjow happier. But he can sense that Grimmjow’s reiatsu levels are not yet what they were. 

“Fuck you, I feel fine.”

“Grimmjow,” Ulquiorra says, and tries to inject his level of concern and exasperation into that one word. They’ve been arguing for the better part of an hour. Apparently it has some effect, because Grimmjow just huffs and leans back against his bedrest. 

“At least kiss me,” Grimmjow says. “And make sure you smash whatever stupid human Aizen wants to see.”

“Yes,” Ulquiorra obliges. He leans in for Grimmjow to kiss him. Grimmjow nips his lower lip with his teeth.

When he leaves, Yammy begs to accompany. Aizen lets him, and Ulquiorra enters the human world with the big brute in tow. 

As the dust clears from their landing, human grass is unfamiliar. The sky is too bright. Ulquiorra feels unnaturally pale. The woods, however, are a pleasant shade of green. He looks up at the rustling branches and thousand leaves. Its level of detail and variation appeals to him. It reminds him of _his_ tree. He thinks he could be content if he were to leave Aizen for a forest, somewhere, where the seasons turn and nothing bothers to chain him. 

Previously he had too little motivation and the inevitability of Aizen hunting him down to leave. But he has Grimmjow now. He cannot leave.Now, he has… he has whatever they have, between them. He is not sure what it is. 

“This place is so boring!” Yammy thunders. It tears through Ulquiorra’s thoughts like a klaxon. 

“You insisted on coming, Yammy. Stop whining.” 

“Yes, yes,” Yammy mumbles. He begins to stomp through the earth. Ulquiorra ignores him and looks up at the sky again. Seeing a _sun_ is so odd. Why does Hueco Mundo have no sun? Is that why is Hueco Mundo so cold? Sunlight is the equivalent of reiatsu here, in the human world. It gives plants energy to grow and to flower. 

If he could bottle sunlight, he would. He would bottle sunlight and bring it back to Grimmjow. If Grimmjow is not allowed into the outside world then Ulquiorra should bring it back for him. 

He is, again, brought back to his surroundings when Yammy devours the souls of onlooking humans. Momentarily Ulquiorra feels guilty. As though a pet of his had defaced property because he had been negligent. “Why do they taste so bad?” Yammy asks. 

“They’re too weak.” Ulquiorra has never tasted any souls. In his time masked, he had never devoured any, never been able to — without a mouth —, and never needed to devour any to become an arrancar either. He simply assumes, so that Yammy can cease making a commotion and distracting him from his thoughts. 

“Well, they kept staring at me like I was a freak!”

“Humans can’t see us. They wouldn’t have been staring at you.” He forgets how _stupid_ Yammy is. It’s an integral trait of them all. Their personalities are so scarred and flawed. 

“I know, I know. But I still don’t like it!”

Ichimaru said he and Aizen had created them, Ulquiorra realises. It makes him pause. They’re the equivalent of lobotomised humans. They _have_ no capacity to be… more. They’re born as hollows from strong, single-minded emotions of vengeance. Those emotions carry over. It simply isn’t possible for some of them to have a broader depth of thought. They weren’t created for it. 

Perhaps that is why Grimmjow is so stubborn and angry. He _cannot_ be otherwise. That is why Nnoitra is so power-hungry, why Yammy is so dull. No other part of them exist. It is, he realises, disheartening. What emotions and what depth he has been trying to coax out of Grimmjow _do not exist._

It is as though they have only two receptor cones for colour. They cannot begin to imagine what the other colours are like. It is that impossible. 

It’s revelatory. How can you try to force autonomy out of something that doesn’t have the capacity for it? If you think a program- something pre-written and constrained– can love you back, is that delusional?

“So what now? How many are we going to kill?”

“Just one, and maybe not even.” Ulquiorra glances over at him, huge and impatient. They really are only tools. Some of them, like Grimmjow, fight so much for autonomy, but even _that_ is foreseen and pre-programmed. “Leave the others alone.”

“Wait! What a surprise!” Yammy lumbers forwards. “We have a survivor.” 

There’s a human, coughing, trembling, bloodied. The sight is nostalgic, for some reason. Perhaps it is her black hair or her delicate frame. She looks like him. She’s babbling and terrified. 

Yammy is overjoyed. He’s babbling back. He thinks she’s some strong spirit. “No,” Ulquiorra corrects him. She looks like him. “She’s not. She’s trash.”

Yammy is about to kick her head off. Ulquiorra watches, oddly detached. He should stop Yammy, he realises. He wishes Yammy hadn’t come. He causes so much trouble. He isn’t a trouble-maker like Grimmjow. At least Grimmjow is charming and finds new and unexpected ways to trouble Ulquiorra. Yammy is just a brute. 

Someone else stops Yammy. Some human, with a modified arm. There’s also a girl who’s arrived. “These ones?” Yammy asks. 

“Think for yourself,” Ulquiorra says. Yammy rips the arm apart. The girl comes running back, crying out. 

“How about this one?” Yammy laughs. He doesn’t wait for Ulquiorra’s answer this time. He aims a blow at the girl, but she blocks it with some triangular shield, and then drops to her knees and begins healing– no, turning back space to re-knit the boy on the ground with- is that spatial manipulation?

Ulquiorra should take her back to Hueco Mundo. Her ability is useful. For arrancar who won’t stop tearing themselves apart, she could be some form of damage control. Ulquiorra should take her back discreetly, though. They all see humans as flies and pests. He’d have to hide her somewhere. “Useless,” he says. It’ll be easy enough to fool Yammy into thinking she’s dead.

He doesn’t even need to, because yet another human arrives. He’s the one that Aizen’s been looking for and draws his shinigami bankai immediately. He cuts off Yammy’s arm. He shouts nonsense about killing them both. Ulquiorra watches on dispassionately. The human has no control over his power, clutching at his own face, and that stops him from cutting up Yammy further. 

Fortunately, even _more_ humans arrive. Ulquiorra has been told of these two. Aizen had briefed him before leaving. Urahara Kisuke and Shihouin Yoruichi. The lady kicks and throws Yammy around. The man begins offering medicine to fallen humans. Ulquiorra doesn’t stop him. He just watches the way he lifts them gently, whispering words of encouragement. The interactions are completely alien. They’re what Ulquiorra only does when nobody, even Grimmjow, is watching. What Ulquiorra hides and represses so desperately yet humans flaunt so casually. 

Yammy blows a cero at the lady, and the man deflects it. “That’s impossible!” Yammy shouts. 

“Cry, Benihime,” Urahara calls. Ulquiorra finally takes notice. It’ll slice Yammy in two at this rate. He steps forward and swipes it to the side as easily as batting aside a fly. Then he punches Yammy in the gut for being such a tremendous waste of energy and time, drawing attention and the alert of the human world. 

“What–“ Yammy coughs. The blow cut open his stomach. It’s bleeding. “What the hell, Ulquiorra!” 

“You’re outclassed,” Ulquiorra says. The target of his words is ambiguous, but he holds Urahara’s stare. 

Both Urahara and Yoruichi are defeatable by Ulquiorra alone, and Ulquiorra doesn’t care about what happens to Yammy. But the human they’d come for is too weak to bother with. He’s aware that Aizen has bigger plans, and the plan had never been to eliminate the boy. Not at this stage. Aizen’s plans are often convoluted. 

Ulquiorra opens a portal behind them with a draw of his finger, and although the lady taunts them, he tells her that she has wounded members. She’ll be the one who comes out worse, and Ulquorria doesn’t care about Yammy. Ulquiorra looks at the blueness of the sky and the human world one more time and thinks of Grimmjow’s eyes before it closes. 

Aizen is waiting for them in the palace when they return. Yammy grumbles and drags his feet the whole way. All the numbered Espada are present, even Grimmjow. Ulquiorra brightens to see him. His fracćion members must’ve approved to let him out. He looks his usual self — bored, propping his chin on the heel of his hand, his face in profile gorgeous. Ulquiorra can follow the line of his jaw to the elegant curl of his fingers. Grimmjow doesn’t style his hair but that it just seems to fall into place, mussed but in an artful sweep of waves and sharp turns. He has his sleeves rolled up, showing the muscle of his forearm. His shirt is open and short. Ulquiorra finds himself glancing at the hollow hole and the sculpted plane of Grimmjow’s stomach and tones of his chest. 

“Go ahead, Ulquiorra,” Aizen says. “Show us what you saw in the human world.”

“As you wish.” Ulquiorra turns to his king and owner and fits two fingers under his eyelid. The eyeball scatters into a mist that the others see in their minds. 

“I see,” Aizen murmurs. “You chose not to kill him. You followed my orders.”

“Yes,” Ulquiorra says. “He didn’t seem to be an interference in our plans, so—“

“–That’s weak,” Grimmjow says, suddenly. 

He’s smiling, cross-legged, smug. “If it were me, I would’ve killed them all with one attack.”

Grimmjow has never openly challenged him like this since they’ve began their fraternising. The sudden aggression, particularly in front of all these arrancar who _know_ their relationship is— puzzling. Ulquiorra looks back at him. “… Grimmjow,” he says in acknowledgement, unsure how to respond. 

Nnoitra’s smirk across the table is a huge, broad, gleam. 

“If your orders had the words ‘kill him’ in them, you better have actually fucking tried, right?”

“I agree,” the Espada beside him says. “He is an enemy. Even if there is no value in killing him, then there is no value in letting him live.”

“And look at Yammy!” Grimmjow’s eyes are afire, passionate. Ulquiorra is confused. Slightly irritated. “Look how badly he got beat—! All I’m hearing is _I couldn’t kill him_!”

Yammy pulls his lip up in a sneer. “Hey Grimmjow, didn’t you see? It wasn’t the kid that beat me up. It was the sandal and the dark lady.” 

“I said,” Grimmjow spits, “kill them _all_. Unless you’re too weak to.”

“What did you say?” Yammy demands. The air crackles with a sudden influx of reiatsu.

“Stop,” Ulquiorra says, to Yammy. Then, “Grimmjow. Aizen-sama is interested in the boy’s rate of growth. He may prove both powerful and useful in the future.” 

“That’s what’s weak! It’s clearly bullshit!” Grimmjow’s mask has its teeth parted, too. “What if he grows out of your control? He’s already cutting up Yammy!”

This public debacle is a humiliation, and not for Ulquiorra. “Your fear betrays _your_ weakness,” Ulquiorra responds, and floods the room in a display of his reiatsu as his voice grows colder. Some of the higher-numbered Espada visibly pale as it pressures them. Ulquiorra’s reiatsu has always, even while not as forceful as his lower numbers, felt _oppressive_. Others have said that his despair is palpable through it. “I have no such doubts. If the case arises, then I will kill him. You have no objections to that, do you, Grimmjow?”

To say yes would be a direct challenge to Ulquiorra’s strength. Grimmjow must know that Ulquiorra will beat him, each and every time, by now. Grimmjow bares his teeth and says nothing.

“Despite what your brothers have said, I am very impressed with your work, Ulquiorra,” Aizen says from his stone throne. 

Brothers– Ulquiorra doesn’t approve of the word. They’re not all comrades. 

But what had prompted Grimmjow to be like this? “I am very grateful,” he responds, and turns back to the king of Las Noches.

*

Ulquiorra hunts down Nnoitra almost immediately after. At least Nnoitra has the mind to expect him. “What did you do to him? What did you say?” Ulquiorra says, appearing in the doorway like a shadow.

“Nothing that wasn’t the truth.” Nnoitra’s tongue flicks out briefly to wet his lips. His number flickers into views as it does. Five. 

Ulquiorra blackens the hallway with his reiatsu, unwilling to make a threat with words. He is certain that Nnoitra had done _something_ , particularly with that reaction. 

“I told him that you threatened me,” Nnoitra relents, but he doesn’t look like he’s relenting. He’s smiling wide from ear to ear, splitting. “He asked, you know. He ordered poor me to tell if you’d done anything. As if he’s got the rank to be ordering me! But I was so gracious, and I told him — you called him _yours_ and threatened that I stay away. Isn’t that embarrassing?”

He’s talking to thin air. Ulquiorra’s already gone. Of course Grimmjow would be angry on hearing that. It’s bad timing. If Ulquiorra hadn’t left Hueco Mundo he could’ve _talked_ to Grimmjow. Instead Grimmjow feels demeaned and weak, again. He feels like even Ulquiorra looks down upon him. He feels as though they all look down on him. As though they see him as Ulquiorra’s pitiful charge. No wonder he was so desperate to prove differently in front of all of the other Espada.

It frustrates Ulquiorra. Why can Grimmjow not understand that not everything is about physical or spiritual power? He _does_ have power over Ulquiorra. They simply both refuse to admit it because it’s too terrifying, too revealing, beyond the realms of their understanding to _care_. What if what this feeling Ulquiorra has for him isn’t even love? It is some delusion. It is some delusion that drives him to Grimmjow’s quarters now, some delusion that makes him throw open the doors and some delusion that sinks into his stomach when he realises Grimmjow isn’t there. None of his fracćion members are there. The building is empty. Grimmjow’s gone. 

Ulquiorra hasn’t felt this sort of dread before. Where is Grimmjow?

Has he gone to prove to the other Espada that he isn’t under Ulquiorra’s thumb? No– he would feel the fighting if it was taking place in Las Noches. Outside it? There is no motive to leave the city. Where else could he be? 

He opens a pit into the human world right there, dipping into the dark night of Earth and emerging onto a building rooftop where the wind is cold and the landscape is unfamiliar and the air is clear of sand. He can see fighting on the horizon, and he can recognise Grimmjow’s reiatsu immediately. The idiot! Ulquiorra leaps across the rooftops as quickly as he can, picking out several different fights. Grimmjow’s there on the street, fighting the boy. He’s grinning. He’s laughing. Ulquiorra hasn’t seen him this happy in a long time. No one’s been giving Grimmjow ‘good fights’.

That’s almost as much of a blow as the sight of another portal opening and Tousen stepping out. 

*

Ulquiorra isn’t there to witness it when it happens, but he does see Grimmjow walking back through Las Noches clutching his stump of an arm, teeth gritted. He’s lost all his fracćion members too. Ulquiorra longs to go down to him. To hold him and to ease his anger. Yet the scenario unravels in his mind like strings of water in his hands. In his mind he can see Grimmjow lashing out at him. He would snap at the fact that their power levels were even more distant, now. He would snap at the fact that he feels so weak and that he _is_ so weak: Ulquiorra threatened Nnoitra for him, he lost an arm, he doesn’t even have the power to defy. 

No one is on his side. He hasn’t won _anything_. Grimmjow’s anger will hurt them both. Grimmjow has nobody left. His fracćion members died while on Earth. Ulquiorra aches desperately to be able to ease his pain. Grimmjow just wants to fight, he wants something to prove to him that he still has strength. 

That is what Ulquiorra must bring back to him. His ability to fight. How can Ulquiorra possibly give Grimmjow’s strength back to him? 

It hits him harder than any physical blow. The _girl_. Ulquiorra needs the girl. 

He cannot simply _take_ the girl without aurthorisation. He goes to Aizen with all the single-minded determination of an arrow and kneels and says, “Aizen-sama, I would like to request something. The girl that I had met during my excursion— I would like to bring her back.” 

Aizen, his king and owner, watches him coolly with his dark eyes. He is judgement within his own right. “Request declined.”

“She has the ability to manipulate spatial matter,” Ulquiorra continues and tries not to reveal his desperation. He remains kneeling and his head remains bowed. “She can manipulate time in a select portion of space.”

Aizen sighs. Ulquiorra hears him stand. “I said no, Ulquiorra.”

Ulquiorra has no other choice. He must bring the girl back. He must save Grimmjow’s arm and return Grimmjow’s livelihood. With that mission in mind, he does not rise. He hears Aizen walking away. Chasing after him would be impudent so Ulquiorra remains. He can only wait for Aizen to give him a chance. Grimmjow would balk if he knew of this. It’s too degrading for him to do but it’s something that Aizen requires sometimes. 

He has no need to eat nor sleep. He can empty his mind. One week later, the only movement Ulquiorra has had is lowering in his place, kneeling in the throne room, head pressed against the tiles. Its texture is cold against his forehead. Somehow everything in Hueco Mundo is unfailingly cold. He has only found one warm thing inside. To preserve it, he would be willing to kneel for ten lifetimes. 

It’s fortunate that Aizen returns before that. Ulquiorra hears his footsteps and his sigh. “You _are_ my favourite, Ulquiorra,” Aizen says. “I don’t think any of the others would wait like this for me.” His voice circles like a shark. “They’re all a little too… independent. All my little children chased by their own little demons that try to drive them away from me. You’ve never had one. Until now.”

“I remain loyal to you.”

The walking stops. “I told you no, but you won’t take it. You’ve never done that before.”

Ulquiorra has no answer to that. Surely Aizen doesn’t want him to admit that he would go to ridiculous lengths for Grimmjow. Ulquiorra is not sure he can admit it aloud. He can barely admit it in the privacy of his own head. “I apologise.”

“I should kill him,” Aizen says sweetly. Ulquiorra’s breath stifles in his throat like a clenched fist. “But then you’d never listen to me again, would you, Ulquiorra?”

If he killed Grimmjow— Ulquiorra’s chest tightens at the thought, “—I cannot answer that. I apologise.”

“Then remember that if you ever stop serving me, I will. I’ll kill him over and over again, and I’ll make you do it.” It’s another collar around him, but it’s one that he will take. Aizen leans forward. He reaches for Ulquiorra and slots his finger through the hole in Ulquiorra’s throat and uses it to force his gaze upwards. Aizen’s smile is curved like a poised guillotine. “Well, if you want this so much, then I expect you to watch over her safety, tend to all her needs, spearhead this abduction… you’re familiar with the routine. Prepare everything.”

“I will,” Ulquiorra says, his relief like a rush. “I will.”

*

Another Espada, Luppi, is given the place of sexta. Luppi challenges Grimmjow for his place in a duel and Grimmjow has never learnt to back down from a fight. The ensuing battle is another embarrassment. Ulquiorra watches it and when he does, he feels his heart growing heavy, as though his blood is too thick to be flowing through his veins properly. After the first round of blows he already knows its outcome, yet he can’t help but feel his hope for Grimmjow’s victory being squeezed like a pale neck as he continues to lose. He wants to leave, to stop watching, but it feels oddly disloyal. 

Ulquiorra approaches Grimmjow, after. Grimmjow is in his room. His hand is bloody and there is glass over the floor where he’s smashed out the window. Ulquiorra says nothing. He gives no acknowledgement. He just steps forward and takes that bloody hand and begins to pick shards out from it. He can feel the prickle of Grimmjow’s gaze over his neck. Ulquiorra kisses his wounds and so that bitter-strong taste spreads against his tongue. He offers himself towards Grimmjow, as though his body is a bandage, as though he can make his presence soothing. 

He tries not to seem like a threat — him, slender and pale like a wish-bone. He knows he’s succeeded when Grimmjow’s one remaining arm clasps over his torso and hugs him close and he can feel Grimmjow’s breath against his hair. 

“Are you gonna tell me off?” Grimmjow asks, hoarsely. Ulquiorra realises that they haven’t talked since their interaction during the meeting, where Grimmjow had openly defied him and then gone storming off into the human world. He seems braced for harsh words. It saddens Ulquiorra to think that Grimmjow expects more abuse. 

He tucks his head further snugly against the line of Grimmjow’s jaw. “For what?”

“I was an ass to you in front of Aizen.”

“I don’t care about my reputation.”

Grimmjow tenses slightly, but there isn’t enough bite in Ulquiorra’s tone for it to be proper chastisement. “You should.” Care about his reputation or tell him off? Ulquiorra opts for the latter. 

“Chiding you would make you feel worse.” 

“You’re saying you don’t want me to feel bad?” Grimmjow says it as a half-laugh, half-skeptical, but his body betrays his disbelief. They believe in apt punishment, here. That is how Aizen has raised them. 

“Of course not,” rolls off Ulquiorra’s tongue easily. The silence that follows it feels heavy and telling, but Ulquiorra reassures himself with the thought that he can out-wait Grimmjow to any end. He thinks that that Grimmjow cares too little to _actually_ suspect, and that Grimmjow thinks him too emotionless to genuinely have feelings like this. “Negative emotions are an impediment to progress.“

Grimmjow shifts behind him so that his arm can wrap entirely around Ulquiorra. The silence shifts into contemplative. “I never managed to figure out…” he says, slowly, “… why, exactly, you let _me_. I’m not even a part of the top ten anymore.”

Inside the statement is the implication that Ulquiorra wouldn’t want to sleep with someone who was not powerful. “I don’t care about your number.”

“You’re happy for me to be this fucking weak?” It’s an accusation.

Ulquiorra turns around. Grimmjow’s eyes are glinting like knives. “Next week you will go to Karakura,” Ulquiorra says flatly. When unsure of delivery he resorts to his default, and watches as Grimmjow’s expression shifts into shock. “You will help create a diversion while I capture the girl and she will restore your arm. You will regain your position then.”

Grimmjow seems at odds with what he wants to say. His lips are parted slightly — and he licks them, perhaps nervous — and his eyes are fixed on Ulquiorra. “You didn’t answer,” he says, finally. He seems wary of questioning the mission to Karakura, as though questioning it may momentarily make it unreal and that his chance to get his arm and his life back will escape him.

“I don’t care about your number, Grimmjow, but I do consider how it impacts you.”

“Not that,” Grimmjow says. Suddenly his hand is spread against the curve of Ulquiorra’s spine and there is no more space between them. “Why do you keep trying to do so much shit for me?”

That isn’t a question he can answer honestly. Ulquiorra just raises his hands and touches Grimmjow’s face. They’ve been doing this for long enough that Ulquiorra can feel confident to make the first touch, now. For a moment he meets those sea-pool gleam of eyes but then he brings their mouths together. Grimmjow’s lips move immediately against his, not urgent but slow and steady, the type of kiss borne from familiarity. All too soon Grimmjow begins to angle his head and deepen their kiss, and slowly walk them back to the bed. 

“You ruin me,” Ulquiorra answers as Grimmjow has broken away and is kneeling above him and shedding his clothes. Grimmjow’s expression doesn’t change, but his movements slow for a brief moment. He seems almost quizzical. Maybe he dismisses it as a mystery he’ll never understand because he doesn’t stop to ask. Instead he strips the rest of the way and gives Ulquiorra what he wants. 

*

The girl is easy to capture. Ulquiorra brings up images of her friends and she caves so quickly that he could almost lament her empathy. Others would use it against her, just as Aizen had threatened to kill Grimmjow if Ulquiorra ever disobeyed, though Ulquiorra does not forsee a future where he has to disobey Aizen. 

Just when he began to become interested in pursuing freedom, he found Grimmjow — a reason to stay. A shackle. It’d be almost convenient if they weren’t inherently connected. It was how he was created, he assumes. 

She is a soft-looking thing, with big chestnut brown eyes and sun-seen skin and autumn-hair and no sharp edges. She begs him not to hurt her friends. He considers leaving her with Aizen but decides that is unwise, and instead tells her to wait for him in the passageway between worlds as he goes to collect his fellow arrancar from Karakura. As usual it is a foreign sight, all blue sky and white clouds, and he follows the edges of Grimmjow’s reiatsu to where his wild and blue-haired lover is enraged, bleeding all over — what a terrible world Ulquiorra lives in that this should be a usual sight — and fighting a masked man with short-cut hair. The orange boy is on the cracked street, also bleeding, clutching a girl to his chest. 

“Grind!” Grimmjow yells. There’s blood running down his temples, down a huge slash in his chest, and his reiatsu surges in a tidal wave as it prepares to unleash.

Ulquiorra reaches forward with a delicate slender hand. Stops him. He is aware of the sight they make. With only a touch to the hilt of his blade, his narrow shoulder like the downy limb of a white tree alongside Grimmjow’s. They are close enough that Ulquiorra can feel the radiance of his body heat. 

“Ulquiorra—” Grimmjow hisses, angry at being stopped, though not particularly.

“Let’s go,” Ulquiorra says. She’d begged him not to hurt her friends, and while he would like to punish the mask-wearing man for hurting Grimmjow, he suspects that Grimmjow’s blood is singing with the fight and that he’s actually quite pleased. Moreover, they have greater things to anticipate. 

He looks down at the orange-haired boy, who is staring at Ulquiorra with loathing and desperation and determination. Ulquiorra has seen those emotions a thousand times before. Ulquiorra thinks that when this boy sees something stronger than him, like Ulquiorra, he wants to tear it down. It reminds him of Grimmjow. 

Suddenly that makes him coldly enraged. This boy has met him only twice. Neither times did Ulquiorra hurt him. Ulquiorra has _stopped_ this boy and his companions being hurt in each of their encounters, but in the boy’s eyes he sees an unwinding narrative where Ulquiorra is another milestone to beat, another monster in his way. 

Ulquiorra has his own life, his own goal, his own wish and longing and wants and experiences far beyond what the boy knows of him. This boy’s hatred is a shallow thing that twists the entirety of Ulquiorra’s existence into a narrative that will fit his eyes. _This_ is why Ulquiorra decides he dislikes the boy. It is not because the boy is weak, nor because the boy is human, nor because Grimmjow smiles when they fight, nor because the boy is growing in power. It is because he is _foolish_ and sees within only the realm of his own selfishness. Perhaps the boy is told and believes that he is saving the world, but Ulquiorra sees the truth inside those eyes. He does it for the fight. He enjoys elevating his strength and tearing down others with power with righteousness ego. 

Ulquiorra knows that this is hypocritical — he doesn’t empathise too deeply with his own enemies’ lives — but he makes no illusion of it. This boy is no better than any of them, these lobotomised-stupid and disabled and innately stunted Espada. If he holds pride in his humanity, he certainly holds himself to delusional standards of the most rotten cesspool filth of them all.

He tells the boy, “The sun has already set in our hands.” 

If only Ulquiorra knew that this boy would later be the catalyst to his greatest bane. He would’ve killed him right there, splattered his soul against the stones. 

*

Ulquiorra waits for her in the forest he first arrived in. It looks decidedly different at night. Nighttime should remind him of Hueco Mundo, but it doesn’t — there is too much life and noise. The trees keep murmuring, and the crickets keep chirping, and far-off birds call lowly and the grass and flowers tell him secrets. In Hueco Mundo there is only the sand and facade of a sea. 

Her approach is announced with the snap of twigs and rustling. In the dark he can see her eyes are pink at the edges. If he were more generous he would feel bad, because she has done nothing to deserve being removed from her home and removed from where she was content — like Ulquiorra, lying in the cradle of branches of a dead white tree — except for having a power that Ulquiorra needs. But instead he extends a hand to her and takes her away to Hueco Mundo. 

She is warm, but not in the way that Grimmjow is. Grimmjow brims with dangerous vitality while she is warm like cotton cloth. She stays surprisingly close to him as they walk through the sand and towards Aizen’s palace, and stares wide-eyed at all the buildings that seem to move when the sand blows like enormous beings that walk in the black-steepled sky. When the doors parts for them, there is a fine tremor in her arm, and Ulquiorra parts from her side. “Welcome,” Aizen says from his throne, “to our castle of Las Noches.”

The other Espada have gathered to witness her. Only Grimmjow, because of Ulquiorra, knows the motivation for her arrival. It’s written on his face. He looks anticipatory and hungry. The others wear various shades of disgust at the sight of a human and the knowledge that they fought to capture a mere _human_. 

“You are Inoue Orihime, correct?” 

Her voice is timid, “Yes, sir…”

“Sorry to seem too forward, Orihime, but would you show us your power?”

“…Yes, sir.” She looks dazed from then sheer force of Aizen’s reiatsu, even though he is only displaying a fraction of it.

Aizen’s smile broadens. “It seems that some of us are not so happy about your arrival. Isn’t that right, Luppi?” 

He turns his gaze to the short little arrancar who leaps up to his own defence immediately. “Of course... our entire fight was just a smokescreen to lure out this girl. Who’d be happy with that?” 

“My apologies.” Everyone in the room flinches minutely. Aizen does not _apologise_ , and these words are clearly mocking. “I didn’t expect you to get so severely beaten.”

Aizen, Ulquiorra realises, is in a mood to draw blood. It raises Ulquiorra’s metaphorical hackles. Ulquiorra must be prepared to protect any of his charges — Grimmjow and the human girl. If this is how Aizen shows his good humour, it is an odd thing. Ulquiorra has always been obedient enough to forgo learning to read Aizen’s moods. The only moods he are familiar are Grimmjow’s, and this is through the brute force of familiarity and trial and error.

“Orihime, to demonstrate your power— please heal Grimmjow’s arm.”

Luppi begins to laugh, but there’s a nervous tinge to it. “She can’t do that! It was reduced to dust by overseer Tousen! She’s no god!”

No, she is no god, but neither are any of them, and it has never stopped them. Luppi continues to brag and shout threats. Ulquiorra tunes him out of his ears and is focused, instead, on the girl. She is even shorter than him. She doesn’t come up to Grimmjow’s shoulder. Normally Ulquiorra barely does. It gives him a sense of how small he must be, next to Grimmjow. She seems delicate and weak and the contrast is stark.

Around her fills a sudden light as Grimmjow’s skin and muscle and bone begins to reform. A silent tension in Ulquiorra releases. He’d been uncertain if she could actually do it, he realises. If she couldn’t, Grimmjow would be enraged, Aizen disappointed, and the other Espada jeering. It’d almost certainly be the end of Grimmjow’s reputation. Ulquiorra’s protection would only be able to extend so far. This way Grimmjow gets everything back. Balance is restored. Ulquiorra can breathe.

He should treat her to some modicum of decency, he decides. This favour is a great one. She doesn’t realise it, but she returns his livelihood as Grimmjow’s flesh re-knits and he’s staring down in awe at his hand, unscathed and whole. 

“-How did you do it, woman?!” Luppi is shouting. 

“Do you not understand? Ulquiorra, you saw this as temporal regression or spatial regression.”

“Yes, sir,” Ulquiorra replies, his voice level. It betrays none of his emotions. 

“No human could possess such an ability!” 

“Correct. But this is neither of these. It is ‘the rejection of events’.” Aizen spreads a hand towards her, gesturing. ”It is a power that trespasses into God’s territory.”

Aizen has painted a target onto the bones of this girl. It must be deliberate. He makes it difficult for Ulquiorra. Aizen had chosen to make a public spectacle of her power and chosen to inflate her abilities. They could’ve just as easily never given the reason for their fight. Ulquiorra could’ve kept her hidden. Aizen is playing more games. 

“Hey, girl,” Grimmjow says. “Fix up one more spot.” 

His tattoo returns under her hands, and when she is done, he turns and impales Luppi on his hand, painting it red and wet and laughing maniacally. “It’s back!” he shouts, and that roar echoes the throne room. The girl looks terrified.

Ulquiorra feels his chest filling with something foreign. Is this joy? “Later, _former_ mister six,” Grimmjow says, and with a blast of cero, erases Luppi from existence. 

“It’s _back_! I’m number six!”

Ulquiorra, simplistically, is happy that Grimmjow is happy. Though he does wish it wouldn’t hinge on his power, he will take this overjoyed maniac because _this_ is the Grimmjow that he is familiar with. Tonight they will probably spar, and while Ulquiorra will beat him by leagues, he thinks Grimmjow will still be riding the high of his return to position. Perhaps they can make this ground they stand on more stable, less like a sinking ship, and the future will be more bright and clear. 

He is that mixed sort of happy until Aizen says, “Let’s test the limit of your power, Orihime, shall we?” and raises a hand towards Grimmjow. Ulquiorra sees the spiral of his thought process seconds before it leaves Aizen’s lips. Grimmjow does not. He’s still grinning broadly, Ulquiorra’s poor and lovely fool. “Let’s see if you can bring someone back from death.”

The girl looks up imploringly, also completely unaware. Grimmjow realises too late. 

“What do you like to call it?” Aizen says. He smiles as he settles on the word. Aizen does not need to call it himself, but he does now, just for the mockery, “ _Cero_.”

It’s the condensed blast of Aizen’s reiatsu, not cero — and a thousand times more destructive. Instantly everybody’s vision is filled with white and an explosion rocks the room and the walls quake and reiatsu blasts outwards like a nuke. The shockwave will kill thousands of lower-level hollows outside the city. It would instantly destroy Grimmjow and even Nnoitra simply by combusting their insides like they’ve been squeezed, which is why when the smoke clears, it’s Ulquiorra kneeling there in his first resurrecćion. His wings have half melted into the floor where they span from end to end to shield Grimmjow and his back is a bloody mauled mess and his spine is exposed and gleaming to Aizen’s eyes. 

Aizen knew Ulquiorra would’ve stepped in. Ulquiorra can see it. Some thread in the universe, some red thread that Aizen’s weaving slowly into a rope to hang him with. The blast was too strong, too strong for Grimmjow to have withstood. He _knew_ it would force Ulquiorra’s move.

“Let’s try that again,” Aizen says, smiling.

As the second blow flays the skin from his bones Ulquiorra’s vision is a blur of black and white and he feels his heart seize. What remains of him feels cold all over, and he’s blinking madly to try to clear the blood out of his eyes. Grimmjow is holding him upright, he realises, his wings bent over Grimmjow’s arms. Grimmjow’s no longer happy. He looks shocked and terrified. Don’t look like that, I’ll survive, Ulquiorra tries to say, but all that comes out is a gush of blood and liquified linings of his insides. 

“Hit _me_ , you bastard!” Grimmjow shouts, and Ulquiorra wants to scream _no no you idiot_ because Aizen asks if this is how Grimmjow shows his gratitude. Then he obliges, and Ulquiorra finds the strength to snap his wings wide to shield Grimmjow one more time despite Grimmjow’s shouted protests, and this time it rips them clean off. From the root they are destroyed and eaten away by the flood of power. Before he knows it he’s surrounded by warmth and somehow their positions have been reversed where Grimmjow is clutching him to his chest and kneeling and wrapped around him as though he can somehow protect Ulquiorra with his body. 

He hears Aizen sigh and prepares to die. “I guess that’s enough. Orihime, can you do it?” 

Ulquiorra is far gone enough that he doesn’t even feel her power wash over him, and for the first time in his life, he sleeps — or is unconscious.

And his dreams are colossal and intangible things filled with death that stalk his thoughts like premonitions and which even Grimmjow’s embrace cannot keep him from.

*

He wakes when Grimmjow is carrying him back to his quarters, in his arms, swaying with each step. It is like waking from drowning. His lungs drain away the water of unconsciousness and it drips from his fingers and everything feels heavy. He feels unable to focus except on what is in front of him. “Grimmjow,” he says, trying to put some form of emotion into that one word. Grimmjow is his life-raft but he can’t express it. 

“You _dumbass_.” Grimmjow grits. It’s not the bad sort of anger. Somehow this sort is so fondly familiar that Ulquiorra feels at ease. Grimmjow must be able to read that in the relaxing of his body, because he gets only angrier. “Who told you to step in like that? I could’ve handled that!”

“You didn’t realise he was about to hit you.” The truth is that he couldn’t have ‘handled it’.

“I–“ Perhaps it’s testament to how far Grimmjow has come, because he actually bites his tongue and doesn’t insist that ‘he did realise’. “Don’t you fucking start! If it was me he would’ve shot once! Not _three times_!” Grimmjow’s grasp on him is tight and he shakes Ulquiorra furiously.Over Grimmjow’s shoulder he sees the girl following. She looks wide-eyed and out of place as usual. 

Grimmjow is correct there, however. Is Ulquiorra supposed to say that he wouldn’t be able to stand by to watch Grimmjow get killed? The damage Aizen inflicted would’ve been beyond the realms of their own healing. It would’ve killed him. He doesn’t think Grimmjow realises this. He doesn’t want to tell Grimmjow, either. It would motivate him to be even more rebellious against Aizen, and Ulquiorra doesn’t think that Aizen is targeting Grimmjow at all — he thinks it’s for _him_. These moves are some sort of game against Ulquiorra. Ulquiorra can’t reveal that to Grimmjow because it would reveal how much Ulquiorra cares. “Next time I will allow you to be incinerated, then.”

The insincerity is not lost on Grimmjow. His eyebrows furrow together and he says, “I’m fuckin’ serious. I don’t need you trying to play hero on me.”

“Hero.” Ulquiorra can hardly believe something so outlandish came from Grimmjow’s mouth.

“You don’t have to _impress_ me,” Grimmjow explains in defence of Ulquiorra’s skepticism. “Why the fuck would you try to impress me? Showing off just makes me feel like shit.”

“I’m not attempting to impress you, Grimmjow,” Ulquiorra says. “I just do not want to see you coming to harm.”

Grimmjow’s expression twists. “Why do you say embarrassing crap like that? It’s not like I’m _yours_ or some shit.” 

Ulquiorra blanks. “Of course not,” he says. Numb, he sinks back beneath the water of his mind where everything is weightless and his hearing is dulled. “Set me down. I can walk.”

Grimmjow does. It really is true that Grimmjow must be able to read him better now. That thought in itself is strange. Ulquiorra always thought that he displayed no emotion but clearly the other Espada can sense some shifts in his attitude. The atmosphere has warped slightly. It’s become thicker. Once Ulquiorra is on his feet he approaches the girl and thanks her shortly and cordially. He would give her something more sincere except he does not think that in this moment he is capable of it. 

“I had to do it,” she says in respond to his thanks, still subdued. They’re on level footing. They’re both in places they don’t want to be although he’s not sure she realises it. 

“Grimmjow, I will take her to her prepared quarters. You don’t need to escort us any further.”

Grimmjow seems about to object. His lips part but thinks better of it. Instead he looks disturbed. Aware that something between them has changed but unable to realise what it is. Grimmjow is not stupid, Ulquiorra believes. The possibility that Ulquiorra wants more from him, wants his affection, wants his loyalty and his faith and his priority, _will_ cross Grimmjow’s suspicions soon. And in that sense Ulquiorra feels that he is in danger of Grimmjow pulling away and never returning. He does not want to be present to witness it. 

Ulquiorra takes the girl away to another room that has been designed in his tower. It’s expansive and white, with a single glass window too high to reach that provides view of the moon. There is a large futon pushed up by the left wall and an adjacent bathroom. Otherwise, it’s very empty, but clean and devoid of sand. She stands in its centre where the moonlight falls and looks bleak. It’s as isolated as an island, but it’s no island at all — not the ones of Ulquiorra’s imagination and memories, the ones where the water sinks into the beach like a lover and the sun dances across their joint embrace. “Do I have to do anything?” she asks. 

“No,” Ulquiorra says. Ordinarily he wouldn’t say anything more to a prisoner — because despite how it has been framed, she is indeed their prisoner. The less information a prisoner has the better. “Tomorrow I will take you to see Aizen. Be prepared to exist to serve him and his will.”

“What?” she says. “Is that… what it means to live in Las Noches?”

“Yes,” he says, referring to the fact that they were made by him. They are his tools. They exist for his use. 

“That’s terrible.”

“It is not terrible for a workman’s instruments to exist to serve him.” They were created by Aizen. He removed their masks with the hogyoku and so they became arrancar. Their power is due to him — all except Ulquiorra. Ulquiorra was the only one to always have been a vasto lorde, and to break his mask open (on the tree, the white tree with a thousand prongs like antlers) entirely on his own. 

Or so he believes. Ichimaru said he was truly created by them. Some days he doesn’t know. 

“But you’re not,” she says. “Instruments, I mean.”

He will realise later that she believes they’re full human beings, with mindsets and full sentience like human beings. But they are not. They are limited colour palettes. They’re unfinished. They’ve never had a right to happiness. Parts of them can’t develop. They want a life but not one that she is familiar with. They may look human but they’re only distilled parts. 

Ulquiorra doesn’t respond to her. Instead he leaves to go see Grimmjow. 

He feels like ringing glass on the brink of shattering. The hallways that Grimmjow’s noisy fracćion used to inhabit are quiet. Ulquiorra remembers talking to Yylfordt not too long ago, and now the hollow is dead. “I’m here,” he says when he arrives to Grimmjow’s room. Grimmjow is in his chair, lounging, frowning and looking up at the ceiling. He tips his head back instead of turning his body. He doesn’t look any different than usual. He looks like casual coiled grace. He looks like the reflection of the world in a water droplet. He’s beautiful and sombre and somehow every time Ulquiorra looks at him he’s surprised by his beauty again.

And there it is, that slow self-satisfied smile, as if nothing is wrong. As if his entire fracćion wasn’t killed recently, and as if Ulquiorra has not so much as shouted his longing from the rooftops. “Sit in my lap,” Grimmjow says, and doesn’t mention what happened before. If he doesn’t Ulquiorra won’t, either. Instead he puts a leg over Grimmjow’s lap so he’s straddling. His feet don’t reach the ground. Grimmjow’s hands span his hips and he hums appreciatively. 

Grimmjow is like a heater beneath him. Ulquiorra wants to lean in and wrap his arms around him but doesn’t. Instead he lets Grimmjow look and feels his fill, unbuttoning Ulquiorra’s clothing and letting it fall to the floor until his bare shoulders and bare slant of waist and pale thighs are all exposed. Then Grimmjow feels up and down his spine with familiar motions and teases his chest with his tongue and Ulquiorra sets his hands in Grimmjow’s messy hair and lets him. 

How much time passes like that, Ulquiorra isn’t sure. Eventually Grimmjow’s fingers slide down further and finger him until he comes, and apparently Grimmjow isn’t satisfied by him coming once, because when he’s lying exhausted against Grimmjow’s chest Grimmjow keeps playing with him until he comes again. 

It’s there that Ulquiorra’s mind is floating, unmoored, listening to the tide. There’s just Grimmjow, his fingers, his warmth. Repercussions will arrive later, knives in hand.

*

In the morning the girl is washed and dressed in their uniform. She’s awake when he arrives and looks like she hasn’t slept. Ulquiorra bows shallowly and says _good morning_. She looks surprised. 

“I thought humans were beneath you,” she ventures and looks nervous while saying it. She still seems unsure whether or not she will be punished for being outspoken. 

“Come,” he says, holding the door open for her. 

Her nervousness builds as she falls into step behind him. “When you came to Karakura the first time– you killed all those people,” she says. “You called them trash.”

That was Yammy who had killed them. But in failing to stop his fellow arrancar, he takes some form of responsibility. “And clearly they are,” he replies. “I believe you haven’t thought of them until now. Your friends have forgotten about them too.”

When she hesitates he knows he’s wavered her faith. “They still mean _something_. They’re all still human lives. They all mean something to somebody. You can’t just ignore that.”

“Yes,” he says patiently, “I may. The difference between you and I is that I have no qualms with admitting it. They may loathe me for dismissing their lives, but they are dead, so their loathing no longer affects me.”

“How about the people who cared about them?”

“If there are any, then they may come find me. I accept that consequence.”

He can sense her boggling. “They–“

“Had lives,” he says. “An ant also has a life. You and I do not care when an ant dies. I do not care when a human dies. I feel no elation nor guilt. They are completely meaningless.” 

“There,” she says. “That’s what I mean. But you’re respecting me.”

“By default they mean nothing.” She looks worried. She always looks worried. Just like Ulquiorra. Always worried. Just like Grimmjow. Always angry. Just like Yammy, always stupid. Starrk, always bored. Nnoitra, always scheming. “It’s the way things are. We rage against the perspective of the universe — the reality that we mean nothing. Every mind we change is a fight.”

They arrive. He opens the door for her to where Aizen is waiting. He floods the room with immense reiatsu and summons her forwards but she’s already fallen to her knees from the pressure. Aizen sighs. “Come here,” he orders again. Ulquiorra thinks he isn’t used to working with someone who is so weak. As impressive as the girl’s power is, she doesn’t have much in the form of spiritual energy, so she can’t get up. She stares blankly forward, her body put into overdrive just trying to fight off the intense force that Aizen is giving out. Sweat is forming against her skin. 

Aizen strides down from his throne, cloth swirling around his ankles like clouds, and uses her hair to drag her forwards. “Hello, Orihime,” he says sweetly, and conceals his power again. She comes to her senses and realises where she is. She meets his gaze, still winded — just in time to be smacked, open-palmed and loud. He’s still smiling, as though he hadn’t hit her at all. “When I order something, you do it.”

His treatment now is sharp contrast to his treatment yesterday. It is a part of what makes Aizen so dangerous. He is so unpredictable. What you know about him can be proven false in the blink of an eye.

Ulquiorra is glad that she has the intelligence not to argue. Instead, she nods shakily, and turns her eyes to the ground in respect. 

“When in Las Noches, you are in my kingdom. That means I own you, mind, body, and soul. Do you understand?”

She looks lost. Nods. But has a moment of hesitation that Aizen must see because he grabs her by the chin and tilts her face up to look at his. “Allow me to demonstrate,” he says cordially. “I did not hit you.” His hand dips into her skull and pulls out a thread. “You hit yourself for disobeying me.”

She nods, memory altered, and then looks conflicted. Aizen’s memory removal technique, Ulquiorra knows, leaves you feeling disoriented. It’s as though Aizen has taken a fingernail’s scoop worth of your mind. It’s blacked out, and your mind knows something is wrong — so it is impressionable when it comes to finding solutions. It’ll listen to whatever Aizen offers. 

“Okay,” Aizen says, turning back and walking away, towards his throne. “I have another present for you, Orihime. Ulquiorra, you’re not dismissed. Kneel.”

Ulquiorra does. He’s a good Espada. He’s obedient. The tiles are cold against his knees. Their patterns are very familiar. He’s spent a long time looking at them, from his past up into the present. He’s been here, kneeling for Aizen, so many times.

“I took the time to make Las Noches more welcoming to you.” Aizen’s voice rings through the room. “So I brought someone you’d recognise to keep you company. Arisawa, isn’t it?”

“No!” the girl cries, voice wrecked with despair. The person Aizen brought in must be unconscious, because Ulquiorra doesn’t hear anything but the scrape of shoes against the floor. 

“I brought someone else too, though I don’t think you’d recognise this one.” The girl is sobbing quietly as he speaks. “Look at this man. You won’t recognise him, but we pulled him out of prison. He killed his daughters. One of their friends reported it to the police. See, Orihime– when I’m god, things like these won’t be allowed to happen. People like this won’t be alive.

“So be my hand,” Aizen says, warmly, like the voice of reason. “Prove that you’re with me. Kill him.”

“I can’t,” she says, still crying. “He’s still a man. He still has a _life_.”

“He was found out after he tried to kill one of their friends, too,” Aizen says softly. “Kill him.”

There is only crying.

“Alright,” Aizen says, with all the delicacy of a feather-light blade. “It’s easy, Orihime. Arisawa isn’t even awake. She won’t see what you do. No one will know. Just you and me.”

Ulquiorra isn’t included in the equation because he isn’t _someone_. He’s a hollow. Something empty and incomplete. Not worthwhile. A tool under Aizen’s hand. 

“She won’t see this either,” the shinigami says.

“No! Don’t hurt her!” 

Her cry is high and desperate. The sound of a blade crunching into bone is distinctive, as well as the wet slide of flesh. 

“Look up, Ulquiorra.” He does, and the girl is kneeling above some man he doesn’t recognise, staring at where she’s sunken a long knife into his chest. She throws herself back from the body— or tries to, because Aizen appears behind her and grabs her shoulders and forces her to look. “Look carefully. You’ve cleared the world of one more piece of trash.”

She’s shaking and says nothing. Aizen continues. “But you hesitated. I told you, didn’t I? My word is law.”

The girl screams. Her expression is twisted into horror. For a moment it doesn’t piece together for Ulquiorra — where is her horror coming from? — and then it does. There’s only Aizen and the man and the girl in the room. There’s no other girl, no ‘Arisawa’, but the girl must believe there is. Aizen must’ve conjured the illusion in her mind, and must’ve killed her in her mind. 

Because the girl is clawing at herself and crying and wailing and chanting a litany of _no no no_ in an utter picture of torture. Aizen says, “I’m just joking,” and snaps his fingers to dissolve the illusion. “Your friend wasn’t here. She’s still at home, in her house, safe and sound. See?” 

Just as Ulquiorra had once done to her, Aizen spreads a visual of the human world between his hands, where a dark-haired girl is studying at her desk. The Orihime girl is still crying, trembling, though it’s dissolved into hiccups now. She looks into the image hesitantly, not daring to believe. “You did well, Orihime!” Aizen says, and claps her on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you. You killed that man all on your own. Now, Ulquiorra? Take her away.”

Ulquiorra does, unfolding from his position, and when he passes Aizen, Aizen says, “She’s not the only who cares about something. Keep your brothers in line, Ulquiorra.” He means Grimmjow. In both instances.

He bows his head in understanding, a heavy weight settling in his stomach, and picks up the girl who is as limp as dead and takes her away.

*

When he returns the girl to the room, she has this look in her eyes where she’s staring somewhere into the past. Ulquiorra can see her thoughts clinging to her. She’s killed a man. Her friend’s life hadn’t even been at stake. She’d practically done it willingly. She’d instinctively felt grateful when she realised her friend was safe. Now she’s horrified that she’d felt grateful to Aizen at all. 

Ulquiorra had originally planned a different way for her to feel allegiance to them — through the symbolic wearing of their clothing and willing departure. Aizen knows how to keep her much more effectively, however. He ties her with _blood_ and guilt. No matter what, she cannot bring that man back from the dead. She will forever be a killer. And that will distance her from her friends and her definition of human. 

He is familiar with what it means not to be a human. “None of us are untouchable,” he says.

“Stop!” she goes. “Just– stop. Please.” Her mind is in its most pliable form because it’s broken. It may be remoulded to whatever he sees fit. 

“Girl.” He steers her towards the futon. She sits down with prompting. Her hands are fisted on her knees and they’re still shaking. She opens and closes them and stares at where they gripped a knife and sunk it into a man’s chest to end his life. “You cannot reconcile your actions with your current philosophy.”

“My… _philosophy_? I was supposed to help people!” she says, desperately. “I can’t give his life back— don’t you realise that? Maybe you and everyone else here don’t care about one human life but _I do_ — and taking one is unforgivable!” 

“Yes,” Ulquiorra says, “then if reality and your philosophy cannot co-exist, one of them will be destroyed. Either you will stay in this room and go mad or you will accept your reality.”

“How could I?” she wails, and is not only talking about accepting reality, now. “How could I?! I’m-” her breaths are ugly sobs and gasps, “-I’m a monster, I killed him with my own hands! Oh, how could I?”

“It is easier to be a monster.”

“No,” she says, clutching herself and rocking. “No, no, no.”

“He preyed on his own daughters. He betrayed a level of trust that you consider absolute.” That doesn’t bother Ulquiorra, but he knows it bothers her.

“Is that supposed to make it better?” she demands. “Is that supposed to make me feel more righteous about _killing_ him?”

“But it does, doesn’t it?” he says, and her tears flow faster. She says nothing. Her mouth is open but she doesn’t say anything. He crouches to her eye level. “You cannot rewind this. You will carry this forever. You have killed a human. Extinguishing a life is always transformative. You may not enjoy it. You may not will it– but you will be transformed. Under the force of the world, fate is always moulding you.“

He stands. She has nothing else to say. He doesn’t know if she’s even still listening, because she’s just crying. 

“Either you conform or you break,” he says.

He can’t conform either. He is the sharp k, the word ‘break’. 

Watch the waves break on the shore, and they keep breaking.

*

It doesn’t rain in Hueco Mundo. How that would alter the landscape, Ulquiorra imagines, if it did. It does storm — but the storms are dust storms, and the lightning is just the static of particles. There’s no water to be found. 

Up on the walls of Las Noches, the wind whips his robes around his feet and his hair like a black flag. He thinks he can see Nelliel on the horizon. How long has it been? Maybe a year. Time passes differently in the human world. The moon has rose and set many times. That is all he knows. Time passing is inconsequential to him, because some things do not change. 

If only he could hang himself from these walls and let it all be over, but he could never die like that. Aizen would pull him back up by the noose and put him right back into place. Ulquiorra’s caged. He always has been. Ever since his inception all that’s happened is that he’s traded his cage for a larger and more terrible one. He’s caged by Aizen’s schemes. He’s caged by his fellow Espada. He’s caged by what he feels for Grimmjow. Before these things, life was better. Being in his shell, oddly white, only able to see— Ah, that wasn’t better, either. Being born in the dark, the only bone-white creature in the shadow of the mountains, targeted by everything that moved, unable to speak nor feel nor eat nor here nor die nor live. 

He was bleach bone-white. He remembers. Bleached out. Bleach. That was him.

There have been things that were better. ‘Better’ is too flimsy a way to describe it. Something can only be better or worse. It’s two-dimensional. The first time Grimmjow kissed him: simultaneously better and worse. Fighting the feeling of incompetency to be overwhelmed by sensation. Yet trying to evoke it now, that instant of first connection, is like trying to hold onto a ghost sensation. It’s picked up and ripped away by the wind. He hasn’t slept with Grimmjow for a while, only once since Grimmjow had scoffed at the idea of being lovers. Each time Grimmjow’s sought him out, he’s avoided him, and Ulquiorra is very adept at disappearing when he wants to. Grimmjow doesn’t have wings like him and Ulquiorra can suppress his aura very well. 

He does miss Grimmjow, though. But surely this longing is easier to handle than getting any closer. He’s tried this so many times — pulling away from Grimmjow, knowing that pursuing further is futile — but this time he thinks he’ll succeed. He hasn’t given in yet. Each time he’s tempted to crawl into Grimmjow’s arms, he simply thinks back to Grimmjow’s declarations that Ulquiorra is only a warm body. A tool for his ego. A way to climb the power ladder. Not his lover. That stinging pain sends him away every time. Ulquiorra spends his time split between solitude on the wall and up in his tower. He can hide behind the excuse that he’s looking after the human girl. 

The human girl in question has stopped crying, now. She doesn’t talk to him, though. He suspects she’s found a form of repression. She spends her days looking up at the window and the moonlight that floods in. It reminds him of himself, standing at the window of his tower, looking for a reason to live. 

A minor hollow appears over the lip of the wall behind him, panting. “Cuatro-sama, they wanted to let you know that they’ve already left.”

Ulquiorra flicks a wing in acknowledgement. The hollow hurries out of sight again and Ulquiorra takes flight. Aizen sent out Nnoitra, Grimmjow, Harribel, and himself to investigate one of the underground hollow villages. He and Harribel are merely supposed to watch. The mission is to test the teamwork of the two troublemakers — Aizen wants to know if in the upcoming battles against the shinigami, his Espada will be able to put aside their petty squabbles. Ulquiorra knows better. Maybe the divide comes from something else. Perhaps it’s their ingrained lust for power. Perhaps it’s because Aizen himself sows divide between them.

His train of thought has veered into dangerous territory, so he tempers it. Aizen can always sniff out treasonous thoughts. Ulquiorra is not treasonous. He cannot be. 

The place of scouting is a hole in the sand that slopes away into lightlessness. Ulquiorra lands in time to see the tail end of Nnoitra disappearing inside. Harribel is standing at the top, clearly having waited for him to arrive, and with a signalling nod, she follows after the fifth. Grimmjow is looking at him expectantly. When he lands, Grimmjow smiles — and Ulquiorra is momentarily overwhelmed. He looks away. When he’s looked back Grimmjow has moved closer. “Ulquiorra,” he says, and sounds headily breathless. It confuses Ulquiorra. Is Grimmjow pleased to see him? 

The answer must be yes, because Grimmjow cups the side of his face with uncharacteristic tenderness and kisses down the curve of his cheek, trailing towards his lips. Ulquiorra contemplates pulling away. Why is Grimmjow doing this? There’s no one here to put on a show for — he knows, can sense Harribel and Nnoitra putting distance between them. Grimmjow is never this gentle. 

“What do you want?” Ulquiorra asks, warily, leaning back. Grimmjow follows the movement like the sway of a tree limb, resting his nose against Ulquiorra’s. His skin, his grip, all radiate warmth.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” is the reply. When Ulquiorra meets his eyes, his gaze is too intense, even through the fans of his pale eyelashes. “And what I wanna do is kiss you.”

“You have a mission to carry out.”

“This can’t hurt,” Grimmjow says, and leans down and kisses him, deep and slow, a hand spanning the small of his back. Ulquiorra is weak because he lets him. Maybe it’s the look in his eyes or its the forwardness. Maybe it’s the fact that it has nothing to do with sex, and that there’s no one around to prove anything for. It’s a moment of instant connection, wet and slow and sensual. Then Grimmjow pulls away with a wicked grin, brushes a thumb over Ulquiorra’s cheekbone, and turns tail to chase after the other two Espada. 

It leaves Ulquiorra breathless, his heart thudding somewhere in his ache of a chest, confused, but mostly longing. Grimmjow doesn’t usually treat him with such reverence. 

Sometimes in his head he plays fanciful little ideas of what-ifs. Ordinarily this goes against his pragmatic nature, but sometimes he finds himself analysing their interactions in the past regardless. Remembering how Grimmjow didn’t move his arm away when Ulquiorra leaned in to him. Remembering how Grimmjow held him gently as though he would break. Remembering these single instances that Grimmjow himself must’ve forgotten. Wondering if there is any more meaning to them. He adds this kiss to that list — the list that makes him doubt, and that haunts him and circles his head like a shark. What-if Grimmjow does actually care. What if he does care but just doesn’t want to admit it. 

He shakes it off, but the warmth that it bloomed in him lingers. 

Seeing in the dark is no issue for Ulquiorra. The place is a network of tunnels and caverns, and they follow easily the signatures of auras inside. Grimmjow seems to have decided to rush through, because Ulquiorra can hear the gush of sand where he moves far ahead. It’s a challenge to Nnoitra. He’s trying to beat him — get inside first. 

It’s stupid, but it’s typical of him, and somehow that warms him inside further. Of course Grimmjow would be pig-headed about any win over another Espada, as petty as it might be. Even if it’s in these dark caves filled with sifting sand that sounds like hissing. 

Ulquiorra looks left, feeling a subtle surge in aura, and pauses. It seems like, in their haste, the others missed the entrance. Ulquiorra simply slides into the wall, forcing it to part around him with a measure of his power. When he emerges through the flood of sand it’s to a cavern half the size of Las Noches. Hollows cling to the distant ceiling like bats, and stretching alleys across pillar-like buildings of sandstone bridge a three dimensional network of a city. 

He’s out on a street that ends at the wall. To both his right and left are the sloping walls of buildings. There are no doors here — the buildings are all accessible because they have open archways for entrances. He sees adjuchas lounging inside when he passes these archways. Many of them are sleeping. Some are simply socialising. He wonders briefly how so many have chosen to co-exist in one place when usually they are fighting and eating each other. Most of them, he suspects, have had part of them eaten already, and so they cannot grow further. This stunts the incentive to hunt. He also sees material that must’ve been traded in from Las Noches— traded for manpower — so there still must be some hunts and excursions to the surface.

There seems to be enough activity. Adjuchas walk past him, not realising the extent of his power because he has it suppressed. They’re of varying sizes and heights, paws and limbs, tentacles and scales and fur and leather. One lady-lizard bumps into him, and as he is about to apologise, she grabs his arm. 

“My son!” she rasps, “I haven’t seen you in so long! Please, come!”

She has dark and sand-flecked hair pushing out beneath the scales of her head. Her sclera wet her eyes briefly. Usually he would kill anyone for impudence for touching him, but something stops him — why is she familiar? — and instead he goes with her. He’s steered down alleys with familiarity, and her tail drags a trail in the sand behind them. 

“You’ve grown so big,” she says earnestly. When they enter a darker alleyway, she pulls back her lips and tries to strangle him, so he kills her. He leaves her body there for someone else to find, and evidently he has wasted enough time already because an explosion of reiatsu nearby announces Nnoitra’s presence. Heads peer out from archways like bumps on skin. Ulquiorra expects his two charges to deal with this on their own. He unfurls his wings, to some mutterings of the citizens around him, and sweeps towards the high ceiling of the cavern to find a better vantage. 

From the top, where there are some other winged hollows nesting and hanging, he can see a central building glowing softly inside with some sort of light. He can also see the trail of destruction towards it that Nnoitra wreaks on his way to the centre. Grimmjow walks through the rubble looking as haughty as ever, the gazes of the adjuchas sliding off him. Ulquiorra remembers briefly his breath-stealing kiss, and then looks away. The central building must be some sort of palace, because Nnoitra scales it and after some commotion blasts out a vasto lordes who must’ve been reigning over the city. 

Harribel is opposite the cavern as a small white speck. Ulquiorra leaves the fighting behind and goes to her. The two of them are usually reticent. They don’t spend much time in each other’s company. They are also two of the most loyal to Aizen, or at least adept at carrying out his orders. “Harribel,” he says, when he lands, and even though she’s keeping an eye on the fight, he can tell that she’s listening. It’s from subtle attention in her stance. “What would you wish for?”

“We don’t have the liberty of wishes, Ulquiorra.”

He briefly entertains asking her why her wish isn’t to have Aizen-sama’s approval, but knows that pointing this out will cause her to backtrack. “No,” he says, “but with liberty, what would you do?”

“I would rule,” she says simply. “I would rule in a city much like this one, and my fracćion would live however they wanted.” She has three fracćion members. Ulquiorra is not sure how they do not live how they want now, but he thinks they suffer from some form of harassment from the other hollows on the basis of their gender. 

He is one of the only Espada without fracćion, he recalls. Perhaps that is why he doesn’t understand the connection. Fracćion are oddly unique. It is a relationship that cannot be duplicated with hollows they’d travelled with before becoming Espada. It is trust — somewhat. It is trust built on the promise and respect of power. All relationships in Hueco Mundo are formed off that basis, but fracćion tend to be more long-standing and binding. This is not always true, however. Ulquiorra knows that some of the Espada use their fracćion as experiments or nameless bodies. Ulquiorra had never travelled with any other souls, of course. He had always been alone. That is simply his nature. 

The central tower explodes with the force of the fight. Sand begins to stream from the ceiling where the cavern is cracking open like a maw, and the instability spreads out from the centre across the streets and threatens to crumble the buildings. Harribel follows their progress. Her expression tightens.

“The aspect the hogyoku gave me was sacrifice,” she says. It’s not something he knew nor suspected because it was simply something he’d never cared about. “I’ll maintain the city’s structure. You watch them.”

She takes off for the centre of the fighting and Ulquiorra is left with the responsibility of supervising the fight, if need be. It should be simple enough. Nnoitra is gloating over the vasto lordes and Grimmjow, uncharacteristically, is letting Nnoitra take the brunt of the fighting. It would be idiotic for either of them to do anything here, but Ulquiorra catches that whenever Grimmjow throws a cero towards the vasto lordes, it ‘misses’ and barrels for Nnoitra instead.

Ulquiorra wants to tell him to stop it, but Nnoitra holds his own fine, and Ulquiorra’s interference won’t be appreciated. He would also rather not annoy Grimmjow, so he watches on. 

Grimmjow’s ceros are getting wilder and wilder, and there is little to no pretense of aiming for the vasto lordes now. His shots are with such force that entire buildings erupt whenever they are hit. He shoots to kill. The vendetta between them is not forgotten. With Nnoitra’s recent promotion, Ulquiorra knows Grimmjow’s feelings must’ve soured. 

Ulquiorra isn’t even paying attention when the kill-shot lands. It starts from the eye. The cero connects, Nnoitra’s eye expands and then erupts, bloody wet, and then he convulses and liquid pours from his mouth as his skin stretches like elastic and then his stomach bursts. The rip opens up his chest and peels his face from his skull. Grimmjow laughs, loud and crazed. Ulquiorra feels cold all over. How didn’t he realise it was about to land? What is wrong with him? Something is wrong. Ulquiorra was keeping track of them both all fight. How-

Nnoitra is not dead. His reiatsu signature is still there. Ulquiorra closes the distance towards the fight, aware that Grimmjow is — somehow — falling into yet another trap. It rings shockingly of deja vu. As he gets closer he can see the blood across Grimmjow as Grimmjow tries to desecrate the body further. He tears it apart and slings bits of it everywhere. It does feel like Nnoitra’s reiatsu coming from the body, but it’s strange. There’s something just not quite right about it. 

It’s Szayelaporro and one of his thrice-damned _inventions_ -!

The real Nnoitra is behind Grimmjow, and he has the widest grin as he aims a killing-strike of his own. Grimmjow realises in the last moment. He has only enough time to block the attack, and Ulquiorra slows, his racing heart calming, but Grimmjow doesn’t block the strike. Instead, he aims for one of his own, towards Nnoitra’s heart. It’s a suicidal move that will kill them both. 

Ulquiorra has to pull the full force of his first resurrection to get between them in time, grab each of their thin wrists and _stand there_ , as immovable as the sky, radiating his reiatsu. He glares at Grimmjow. “The vasto _lorde_ ,” he says, all the anger in his voice coming out as ice instead. 

“Oh, I ate him already,” Nnoitra says. “I needed that extra power to try to _kill Grimmjow_ , Ulquiorra. It was only self defence.”

Nnoitra was acting in self defence. Mostly. Any of the Espada would’ve fought back if someone tried to kill them. Ulquiorra understands that. So what was going through Grimmjow’s head to try and target an Espada who is clearly _stronger_ than him? 

“Sorry,” Grimmjow says insincerely, in response to Ulquiorra’s look. “Can’t blame me for wanting to kill him, right? I’m just getting back for the fuckin’ times he tried to snuff me.“

“You know better than this, Grimmjow. Nnoitra is the fifth Espada. You are the sixth.” Ulquiorra is barely holding onto his patience. His emotionless exterior always remains, however.

“He challenged me to fight when I was above him!” 

“Oh,” Nnoitra says in a faux-sympathetic tone that immediately raises Ulquiorra’s hackles. “Isn’t it obvious? He’s fighting me so recklessly because he knows _you_ will stop him from ever dying. It must be nice.”

The realisation hits harder than any blow Ulquiorra has ever received. He falls completely silent. He doesn’t want to believe Nnoitra, but he knows somehow that it’s true. The motive for Grimmjow’s gentleness and affection prior to entering the caves is clear. Ulquiorra is being manipulated. He is being _used_ , so brazenly and openly and somehow he has been love-struck _stupid_ because he did not realise it! Grimmjow aimed a killing blow onto Nnoitra instead of blocking because he’d hoped Ulquiorra would save only _him_. 

“What?” Grimmjow says. He must be able to sense the sudden darkness that’s overcome Ulquiorra. 

Grimmjow had been angry the first time when Ulquiorra butted into his fight, he remembers. Yet clearly now he has no qualms with it. Ulquiorra is only being kept around — only being accepted by Grimmjow — because he will stop a fight he’s losing. Ulquiorra is again merely a tool for Grimmjow’s lust for _power_.

Their earlier interaction, that kiss that had warmed Ulquiorra’s heart, taints. Ulquiorra had fancied it to be reciprocity, but it’d been a farce. It’d been a dollop of pity to string him along and ensure that Ulquiorra remained smitten. So Grimmjow _knows_. Of course he knows. He knows that he means too much to Ulquiorra, and instead of… of all things, he chooses to use that to his own advantage, instead.

The pain and the grief is so absolute that, for a moment, Ulquiorra considers being destructive. But like a passing wave, the moment ebbs. Each time he is hurt by Grimmjow each time he turns it inwards. And each time Grimmjow expects to be forgiven and for Ulquiorra to return, and inevitably Ulquiorra does. Not this time. This is the final straw. Ulquiorra will not. He _cannot_. He cannot trust Grimmjow any longer. 

Ulquiorra’s silence is making Grimmjow antsy. So he knows this too, Ulquiorra thinks with a vicious sort of clarity. He knows Ulquiorra detests what he’s doing. “What?! I thought you liked saving me and you didn’t give a shit who was above who!” Grimmjow protests. 

Ulquiorra lets go. It’s the confirmation that severs his last link of hope. Grimmjow’s done it all on purpose. “Fight, then,” he says, voice like the tempered edge of a blade. He clutches onto his feeling of betrayal and feels it course through him. “Fight like street trash and die like street trash.” 

There’s a bewildered expression on Grimmjow’s handsome features. Ulquiorra turns away from it to come face-to-face with Harribel. “You two failed to retrieve the vasto lorde by killing it instead,” she says. She’s angry too, he realises. Briefly, he shares this moment of kinship with her. Utter fury. “You caused over two thousand hollow casualties. You fought each other instead, and clearly, it was _planned_.” She’s referring to Szayelaporro’s devices. “I have never seen such incompetence and pettiness from even the most stupid of hollows.”

Nnoitra starts to reply, but she rips out his tongue. It begins to regenerate, so she slits open his throat and seizes his vocal cords instead. She holds them there in crushing grip. “Aizen will decide your punishments,” she says. Grimmjow hasn’t taken his eyes off Ulquiorra. He looks confused — and guilty. Though perhaps Ulquiorra is only seeing what he wants to see. 

But they’re leaving and Ulquiorra doesn’t want to suffer Grimmjow’s presence any longer. Hurt, betrayed, enraged — he takes off on his wings. 

*

Up in his tower Ulquiorra feels like a fortress with rusting bars, waiting on an abandoned island while the rain falls and the waves crash the cliffs. Grimmjow is undergoing punishment, he knows. Him and Nnoitra both. Ulquiorra doesn’t now what Aizen is doing to them, and he does not wish to find out. He shouldn’t care about what Grimmjow does anymore. Grimmjow is not his concern. To concern about Grimmjow is to trap himself. Oh, but Ulquiorra has already been caught in the trap. He’s lost his leg to it, and the infection that ensued eats all the way up to his chest. He can’t help but wonder if Grimmjow had planned it all along. He’d been the one to approach Ulquiorra. He’d been the one to kiss Ulquiorra. He’d been the one to initiate things… what if it had been his intention to use Ulquiorra all along? 

He doesn’t think so, but it doesn’t make him feel any better. Grimmjow is much too poor a liar to have been angry the first time. And he’d explained that it was because he found Ulquiorra _interesting_ at first. Ulquiorra, the power grab, the trophy, easy to fuck, and will save your back even if you’re standing against Aizen himself. It’s little wonder that Grimmjow wants them to continue. Ulquiorra is too useful. Throw him a little affection sometime and he’ll keep coming. 

Ulquiorra loathes himself because the assessment is entirely accurate. He is so starved, so lonely, so melancholy — it’s evident and written all over him. It seeps from him. There are these waves of sadness, dripping from him in the monochrome colours of grey. Why did he let Grimmjow twist him like this? Grimmjow dominates his life, now. And to Grimmjow he’s just _somebody_. Useful. He’s not there in Grimmjow’s priorities. If he is, it’s merely as some tool.

A knock comes on the door. His mind leaps to Grimmjow, but he can feel that the reiatsu on the other side is not. It’s Szayelaporro, instead. He stands in the doorway looking uncharacteristically serious. “Hello, Ulquiorra,” he says. 

Ulquiorra doesn’t greet him in return. He just glances up, acknowledging that he’s heard, pressing his lips into a thin line in disapproval at the intrusion.

“Do you think it’d be too much of a favour to ask you to stop looking out for Grimmjow?” Szayelaporro says. He puts on a light-hearted air, but Ulquiorra assumes that he’s actually trying to gauge Ulquiorra’s stance. 

“You’re trying to help Nnoitra remove him,” Ulquiorra says, and gives nothing away in his tone of stone. His heart’s not in the conversation. He couldn’t want anything less than to discuss his _feelings_ and _opinions_ on Grimmjow with Szayelaporro.

“I want sixth place.” 

That is what Ulquiorra had thought, too, the first time Nnoitra and Grimmjow fought. But he doesn’t think the assessment is accurate this time. “Yylfordt is dead,” he says. He sees Szayelaporro stiffen momentarily and knows he’s right. Grimmjow’s fracćion — Szayelaporro’s brother — is dead because Grimmjow had brought them with him to the human world on his reckless mission to kill the humans.

Ulquiorra has become more adept at understanding peoples now. It is because over the past few months his relationship with Grimmjow has forced him into social affairs. No longer can he remained locked up, staring into nothing. But this understanding has arrived too late. He should’ve seen through Grimmjow earlier. 

“You actually knew Yylfordt? That’s high praise for trash like him.” Szayelaporro cants his head back, mocking. 

“Liar,” Ulquiorra replies in dead monotone, and turns away to continue watching Las Noches from the window. If Szayelaporro is going to disrespect him by assuming he can hide behind a pitiful lie, Ulquiorra wants no conversation. He’s had enough of Espada. Espada and their mind games. Espada and their need for power. Espada and their idiocy. Espada and their narrow-mindedness. Espada and their anger. Espada and their volatility. Espada and their pitifully stunted minds, which are moulded by the lingering corrupted souls of humans and the hand of Aizen’s will. 

Espada. They’re all monsters and broken here. Ulquiorra wants none of it. 

“Fine,” he hears Szayelaporro say. “Fine, you arrogant thing. Grimmjow’s recklessness killed my _brother_. I want him dead. I can’t do that with you in the way so _let me_.”

“Aizen-sama would not want you to kill other Espada,” Ulquiorra says hollowly. It’s a default response, and one that he knows Szayelaporro doesn’t want. 

“Then let me _hurt_ him!” His voice rings child-like in the small room. “Let me _hurt him_ like how he hurt me! He let Yylfordt die! He let–” a sharp, rattling, intake of breath– “the one thing of mine that was _good_ and more human than any one of you _die_!” 

Ulquiorra turns around. The eighth Espada is a disgrace, emotions pouring from him, black and blue and raw in a big gushing wound. “I don’t care,” Ulquiorra says. His heart cares only about one thing. There’s no room for more. 

Szayelaporro launches himself forwards. Ulquiorra, the fool, catches him at arm’s length and looks on in disgust as the disaster unfolds. “He’s dead!” Szayelaporro snarls, clawing at Ulquiorra. “He’s dead– he’s _dead_! How is that fair, you mongrel?! How is it fair that he’s dead and we’re still here? He was my brother and-” 

The noise that rips from his throat is close to a wail. “Now he’s _gone_!” 

Ulquiorra prises himself away from the other Espada’s grip. Szayelaporro, bristling, just seems to crumple and cave in on himself. “Fine,” he spits, bitter. He’s lost everything. “One day you’ll care about someone and then they’ll be gone. Then you’ll know.”

I will, Ulquiorra thinks, but says, “Get out.” 

Whatever it is that clings to Szayelaporro is despair, it’s hatred, it’s anger. It’s familiar. “I hope you die. I hope Aizen incinerates you. I hope someone destroys everything you have. I hope they strip you of your powers and your pride and your voice and _everything_.”

Ulquiorra is as cold and toneless as ever. He gathers his reiatsu, threatening to force the other Espada out if he won’t leave. “I won’t allow you to take Grimmjow’s life. Ever. Damn me all you like — I won’t.”

Damn him, damn him. 

*

The girl comes out of her shell on a day like every other. He is standing by the door, having brought her food, and she says, “Doesn’t it ever rain here?”

“Not in the desert,” he replies, and sets the tray down. 

“Have you ever seen the rain?” 

“Yes. I have travelled to the human world.”

“Really? When?”

“Over the centuries. Time passes differently, here.”

She must be thinking of her friends in the human world. “Is it longer for them? Have I been gone for months now? … Years?”

“It is not so linear as that,” he says. He doesn’t think she would be able to understand a full explanation, and so he omits it. 

She looks at the food, then back at the window. She looks miserable. He assumes, like Grimmjow, she is one of those people who loathe inaction. “I don’t like it here.”

No hollow would empathise with her on that. He says, “Hollows would not enjoy the human world either.”

“Why not? Don’t you like to eat people?”

“They do because they need reiatsu to survive. Hueco Mundo’s air is filled with it, but the human world is not.” Talking like this is good. It keeps his mind off other things, the dangerous things. It’s a precarious balance. A knife tip-first. Every move and day of his feels delicate. 

He hasn’t seen Grimmjow since the incident. 

Don’t think about him.

“Why do you call hollows ‘they’?” she asks. “Aren’t you a hollow?”

Ulquiorra isn’t so confident of his answer. Ichimaru said that he was never human. Ulquiorra’s evolution so far has never been as a normal hollow. He’d only ever been a vasto lordes and then broke his mask on his own — the only hollow to have ever done so without the interference of Aizen. But this feels like too much to reveal.

He’d never even told Grimmjow this, he realises. Grimmjow had never asked. Grimmjow had never been interested about the past. He was only interested in the future and going upwards. 

Perhaps this is what prompts him to share. 

“I am not sure,” he says. There’s no harm in it, he imagines. He doesn’t think that it would provide her information to defeat him. “I am unique, among hollows.”

“That’s normal, isn’t it?” she says. “Just like all humans are unique.”

“All humans are _born_. All humans have organs. My circumstances are as odd as waking up in a laboratory and bleeding nothing.”

She doesn’t seem to know how to process that, blinking rapidly. “There’s this movie,” she begins.

“A movie?” He hasn’t heard of the term before. 

“A visual story,” she says. “It’s called A.I., artificial intelligence. It’s about a robotic boy that wants to become human.”

“He can’t,” Ulquiorra says, bluntly.

“No,” she agrees. “He couldn’t. At the end he realised that so he committed suicide by jumping into the sea. It was a really sad movie.”

“I have no desire to become a regular hollow.”

“Why not?”

He feels that she’s been asking too many questions of him — and he’s been answering too many. “What do you know of hollows?”

“They’re–“ she breaks off, looking away. She looks all around the room, at the blank walls, at the high window, at the door, as though searching for a mental exit. “My brother became a hollow,” she admits, in a rush of breath.

She follows that with silence. It’s as though she expects him to understand the implications. “I imagine this is typically when someone offers you condolences,” he says flatly. Her eyes dart to him and widen.

“I didn’t–“

“You must understand that I have no concept of _siblings_ ,” Ulquiorra says. 

“Oh,” she says. She seems shocked. She must’ve thought he was going to say that he didn’t offer apologies. He doesn’t, but he’s carefully skirted that fact. “Family is– they’re supposed to love you. Unconditionally. Even when my brother turned into a hollow, he resisted it for a moment and recognised me. The clips he gave me…” she touches the clips in her hair absently, “they’re the source of my power. It’s not the clips — it’s the love for me that he has.”

“There is no such thing as love in Hueco Mundo,” Ulquiorra says. 

She looks at him with her large imploring eyes.“But you have someone you care about.” She saw him defend Grimmjow with his life in front of Aizen, the supreme ruler of the land. He bites back a frisson of annoyance. It’s pathetic that he can be so transparent to even a human utterly ignorant of their world. 

But it cannot be the same type of love she talks about, because it weakens him rather than strengthens. “There is no such thing,” he says. “We are powered on ambition, hate, and despair.”

She ducks her head to hide her expression. “All of our strength comes from love. My friends will find me because we’re _friends_. Ichigo will find me because… he’s Ichigo.” Her fists curl in her lap. “And I’m still hanging on because I _know_ they’ll come.”

“Hate is simple to create,” Ulquiorra says. “Betray, maim, kill, spin a narrative. Destroy someone’s life and be confident that they’ll seek revenge — even more surely than you know your friends will find you. I could earn your hate much more simply than your love.”

“Yes,” she says, and looks miserable. 

Ulquiorra sighs. He forgets what his motive for speaking with her is. It didn’t make him feel any better, nor did it give him any insight. It’s simply there to waste his time. Not that he would rather be doing something ‘useful’. Very little feels useful to him, nowadays. It’s a slog through the motions and Aizen’s orders. 

It’s time to leave. He bids her farewell on that sombre note with an incline of his head. When he opens the door, Grimmjow is waiting, leaning against the wall opposite.

“I knew you’d be here,” Grimmjow says. He looks dirtied. There’s crusted blood where injuries are still healing — they won’t heal quickly if Aizen doesn’t want them to. His hair is rumpled, his eyes are more haunted than usual. He’s still beautiful in an oddly contrasted, dark, way. It doesn’t affect Ulquiorra’s desire to leave as quickly as possible. He considers backing up and shutting himself in with the human girl instead. 

“I need to figure out why you’re so…” Grimmjow waves his hands. “Riled up.”

“Riled up,” Ulquiorra echoes, skeptical. He closes the door behind him because he would rather not the girl watch. It’s possible that she can still hear through it, but that’s not of great importance in that moment. 

“Yeah, fucking _riled up_. Why the hell do you keep avoiding me? Why were you so pissed off?” 

“Grimmjow, if you cannot fathom it, clearly you do not have the emotional capacity to pursue a relationship.”

“Emotional ‘ _capacity_ ’?!” That, the girl certainly heard through the door. Grimmjow begins to crowd into his space, attempting to back him into the door. Ulquiorra stands his ground. “This is coming from _you_ , Ulquiorra. If anyone’s emotionally fucked, it’s you! Since when did we even need _emotional understanding_ anyway? Do you think anyone has that to spare around here?”

“No,” Ulquiorra bites back. He doesn’t want to continue this conversation. It’s becoming rapidly clear that Grimmjow simply _doesn’t care_. The extent of Ulquiorra’s pain has never even crossed his periphery. “But I realise that I cannot continue to affiliate with you.” It would be destructive for Ulquiorra to return to him. It’s a painful decision, but one he’s been wrestling with for too long. “Stand aside.” 

“Because why?” Grimmjow demands. “Wasn’t an issue for three years, was it?”

There is some unnamable emotion building in Ulquiorra’s chest. If he were someone else, he would shout and scream, but it hits a dam and simply _can’t_ be released. “Because I am used in every fathomable way for your lust for _power_.”

“What’s wrong with _power_?!” Grimmjow says. He seems frenetic, frustrated. “Don’t you want power too? You can do anything with power! You don’t have to put up with Aizen’s shit, you don’t have to put up with the humans’ shit, you don’t have to put up with–“

“With you,” Ulquiorra cuts in. “I do not have to tolerate you — you and your lust for ambition.”

For a moment that renders Grimmjow completely speechless. His jaw works. Ulquiorra’s chest feels very, very, tight. 

“You hate it,” Grimmjow says, scathing. “You actually hate the fact that I want to be stronger. For some fucking reason.”

“Your desire for strength relegates me to the position of _tool_.”

“It didn’t bother you before.”

Ulquiorra says, and it’s one of the first times he has admitted this aloud, “You have reiterated many times that our _affiliation_ was for nothing but carnal pleasure and my position.“

The way that Grimmjow looks at him could peel all the skin from his bones. “Then what _do_ you want?” 

Ulquiorra cannot say it aloud. He _cannot_.

“You want me to love you,” Grimmjow says for him, because clearly the answer had been there, vivid, all along. Hearing it squeezes all the air from his chest. Momentarily, Ulquiorra is overcome by it. His pause makes Grimmjow’s eyes widen. “You actually do,” he says, disbelief clear. “I thought they were all just fucking with me, but it’s true. It’s actually true. _You_.”

Ulquiorra cannot reply; he cannot move; he is a statue, rooted in place, and the world is ashes. 

“You want _me_ ,” Grimmjow repeats. His expression is strange. He doesn’t look happy, nor mocking. Ulquiorra doesn’t think he has ever seen this expression on Grimmjow’s face. Its closest match is _regret_. Ulquiorra wants to vanish. Everything in him has constricted to a sharp, painful, point. “But you know that I’d never be able to give you want you want, and you’d never be able to give me what I want, right? You can’t give me the fights that I want, and I can’t give you the _love_ that you want—“

The next words of his are gone, because through Ulquiorra’s veil of pain he simply reaches behind him, seizes the fabric of reality, and _pulls_ it around him, and vanishes into another world. 

*

In the world where no arrancar walk and where no Espada break hearts, the moon is vivid, and he is a ghost in the trees. Insects scatter at his approach. Owls flutter. The grass breathes. He kneels at the base of a large gnarled tree, in the dark, and simply touches the bark as though it can anchor him. He tries to feel the wind and listen to the sounds.

He’d known it since the start; he’s known it for so long. Grimmjow would not, could not, come to love him. They are _Espada_. A black hole — powerful as it may be — could dream after a star for so long, but the light would never want for him. Grimmjow needed battle. He needed viciousness, the breath of life. 

The grief is searing, like a blade in the moonlight, but he pushes it away all over again. He seals it away. Deep, deep inside. It can be no longer. Never again. 

He is permanently sinking. He is at the bottom of the world with nothing but his aches. He’s lost something that cannot be made right again. Lay down. Turn it off. 

It’s over. It’s over. Let it die. Let him die.

*

The girl says nothing to him when he returns to feed her the next day. He can tell that she knows. She looks at him like how Grimmjow looked at him once — as though he is fragile, breakable. He says nothing to her either.

Grimmjow makes attempts to find him. Ulquiorra dodges them easily. He slips between the dimensions like the silver flash of a fish and never remains in one space for long. He masks his reiatsu to the extent that he remains unreachable to all other Espada. Time distorts, collapses. Encounters blur together, and the attempts to find him peter out altogether.

Nnoitra tries to get him to talk about the girl. He wants to fuck her. Ulquiorra tells him that he’s despicable. 

He sees Nelliel out on the outreaches of Las Noches, running around, laughing without a care.

Ichimaru catches him in the human world. He says, _guess it didn’t work out with Grimmjow_. Ulquiorra tries to block him out, look away. _An Espada physically can't love. You know that_ , Ichimaru says, _that’s why you’re heartbreak. You were always doomed, you know? If Espada had hearts, they would’ve never been hollows. To be a hollow, you shed your humanity, your human heart. At least he didn’t lie to you._

Then what is this, what is this, and Ulquiorra wants to scream, but, as ever, it ebbs and he keeps it in himself, and turns his teeth inwards. 

Fundamentally, Espada have no hearts. He tells this to the girl when her friends are invading Las Noches and she tells him that her friends care for her. They would always come to rescue her, against all odds, because she would do the same for them, and that thread of emotion — _human emotion_ , utter devotion — would drive them forever. 

In that moment, sitting under the light, in their uniform, she is radiant, and he _yearns_. He yearns for what she speaks of, what he can’t have. 

Ulquiorra goes to stop her friend, the orange-haired one. Nel is there. She is happy. She even tried to interfere, and Ulquiorra, briefly, spastically, is grateful that the human gets in the way to protect her. For that reason, he gives the human the option to retreat. Retreat or perish. When he looks at the human dying in the sand, he feels disgusted. Because _he_ has been in that sand. Retreat or perish. He did perish. For the same too-human reasons as this human is dying.

And then, when he returns, the girl is gone. 

Grimmjow has taken her. 

He feels a flare of something and immediately tamps it down. He tracks Grimmjow down immediately, his reiatsu so familiar, and finds Grimmjow healing the _human_.

It is beyond all understanding. Beyond all comprehension.

“What are you doing?” Ulquiorra says, when he arrives, like a whisper on the wind.

“You messed with my _prey_ ,” Grimmjow says.

The girl is healing the other human. She would. Of course she would. She looks at him with something like betrayal, as if they shared a kinship that would extend to _mercy_ for people they, respectively, cared about, and Ulquiorra had betrayed that by hurting this human.

Ulquiorra says nothing. 

It is always about Grimmjow and his prey. Grimmjow and his fights. Grimmjow and his aggression. These have always come before Ulquiorra.

“You may heal him,” Ulquiorra says. He could care less about the other human living. “But the girl must return.”

“This human is interesting,” Grimmjow says, and he’s smiling. He’s _smiling_ , broad and bright, full of life, the life that drew Ulquiorra to him initially and — to his dismay — still blindsides him. “You wouldn’t get it. You _never_ got it.” 

No. He didn’t. And that was why Grimmjow would never come to care for him. 

“Ulquiorra,” Grimmjow says. He approaches. “You’ve been running from me for what, a _month_? I wanted to tell you something.”

Ulquiorra’s hesitation is his undoing.

He can see the girl looking up at him. Her eyes are wide. His weakness is on display for all to see. She knows it. Grimmjow knows it.

There is a wicked, familiar gleam in Grimmjow’s eyes — entrancing — just as he shoves Caja Negación right into Ulquiorra’s sternum, his hollow.

He only has the time to hear a laughed, “I’ll tell you after I kick his ass,” before he is engulfed. 

*

He is at the bottom of the world. 

It is a joke to Grimmjow. It has always been. 

But Grimmjow is correct in treating him as an obstacle. Who would’ve ever expected Ulquiorra to feel? He is the most emotionless of all Espada. He has never been one of them. He has never had his wishes, his wants. He should never have had them. 

Grimmjow has spurned him time and time again. It is enough. It is _enough_. Ulquiorra has had enough. It is over. All these years and he’s had _enough_. Every time he has hesitated and every time Grimmjow has used it. It is enough. 

For the first time — for the first time in forever — he lets himself feel it, all the rage, all the sadness, all the torrential emotion that he had refused to acknowledge existed but had been right _there_ , molten, and he _burns_ utterly with it. 

And that dam in him suddenly opens and is reeled out like the spine from a throat. In the open, he loves Grimmjow, loves him fiercely, loves the headiness and his aliveness, but in the same instant resents all that Grimmjow has done to him — their sheer folly of simply _being_ Espada. Ulquiorra cannot feel Grimmjow’s thrill to fight no more than Grimmjow can feel love for him, and yet, through all of Grimmjow’s callousness, through all of Grimmjow’s sheer incomprehension of his feeling, he does not care. 

Because, somehow, _emotion_ is beyond all understanding, beyond all logic, beyond all eye. 

He heart blazes with the feeling. He will always care for Grimmjow, no matter whether it is reciprocated or not, no matter if is manifests as pain, and, radiant with it, he tears free of the dimension as though it is nothing but dripping silk and steps out into Hueco Mundo. He is burning all over. 

It’s all here. Ulquiorra can see it. He can no longer run away. He can no longer allow his feelings to crush him. They will _be_. Even if it is pain greater than any physical pain he has ever experienced, even if it is betrayal, he will _feel it_ , and be _alive_.

The girl is there, in the castle, with him, alone — without her friends — but she does not look afraid. She looks determined, alive, and for a moment instantly he feels exactly the same. “Are you afraid?” he asks, and knows before she says it that she will says no. 

“No,” she says. “Because my friends are here. And my heart is with them.”

“This heart?” Ulquiorra says. His fingers flex, and tense, and he touches her chest. She stares at him, as though she can tell, can see right through him — can see just as his own eyes see everything — that it is not there.

It is somewhere else. It is all through him. It is every part of him. 

The wall behind them explodes. 

“Get away from her!” a human voice screams. 

It’s the human. The human that Grimmjow wanted to fight. The human is here, and he is unharmed, which means—

Ulquiorra turns. His reiatsu explodes outwards, out into the reaches of the sands, searching far and wide for Grimmjow, and feels no brilliant, familiar, pulse. It is no longer about following Aizen’s orders, or killing trash. 

It is about facing the fight. “I will have no mercy,” he says. He hears the girl’s sharp intake of breath. 

He draws his blade, and for once, brims with his _own_ aliveness, and fights _for_ something. 

*

The human is fast. Faster. He pulls on his mask and _still_ is not fast enough, and mocks Ulquiorra for feeling slower, more human, and when Loly and Menoly attempt to kill the girl because they have the audacity to think him _distracted_ , Ulquiorra blasts them out of the tower.Yammy comes, and another human sends him to the lowermost levels of the tower — and the human, the one who has defeated Grimmjow — tells his friend _I’m entrusting Inoue to you!_

And he pulls on his hollow mask. But it still is not enough. Ulquiorra simply unfurls his wings and the dome of Las Noches shatters with the power of it. He will not be defeated here. 

Ulquiorra’s focus is the blade of a knife. It is the point of a spear. Grimmjow has fallen. This fight deserves everything. The human screams, and he is fiery with righteousness, with his own sheer desire to be _right_ , to _deserve_ this win. 

“I’m _human_!” the human yells. “That’s why I’ll get up again and again — and why I’ll keep getting up!” 

Humans are not like hollows. 

Hollows were born in the darkness. Hollows _are_ condensed hatred and anger and vengeance that lingers after death. Hollows are everything death _deigned not to take_. They did not experience lives with _friends_ , nor _family_. They trust nobody because power and survival is all they have. Killing is carved into their bones and souls. Hollows come into consciousness in fully formed bodies with more power than any human could fathom having. Mistakes mean that their lives end. Power is what made them.

And yet. 

And yet Ulquiorra can feel his heart thudding steadily in his chest, and he can feel the vivid aliveness that he had only ever felt when in Grimmjow’s arms. He can feel it all. His despair is at his beck and call, and when he calls upon it, it fits into him like a second skin, and a second set of his wings unfurl, and his tears darken. He is the sand at their feet. He is the ocean. He is the turn of the Earth.

“You killed what was mine,” he says, and rips out Kurosaki Ichigo’s chest.

The girl — who has arrived, brought by the other human — screams, high-pitched and thin, and he looks over to see the other human come charging towards him that is batted aside with a dismissive flick of Ulquiorra’s tail. 

“No,” she says. She runs towards his body. Ulquiorra lets her. “No. No, no, no— please, _Ichigo—_ No! No!” 

He feels her devastation. “He killed what was mine.”

She turns to look at him. Her eyes are wide and shining with tears. “Grimmjow isn’t dead.”

Ulquiorra’s world drops away — just as Kurosaki stands up again, and he isn’t a hollow now. He is a _statue_ , a grim figure, whiter than any bone, feet and hands that are claws rather than any appendage, and he moves so fast that Ulquiorra barely has an instant to breathe before Kurosaki _attacks_ and drives him back. 

Ulquiorra has never feared death. He had never dreaded death. Aizen promised death at every turn. So when fights he has no fear, and he will _fight_ to survive because he cannot die now because he has a life waiting for him out the other end. Kurosaki is no longer anything recognisable — faceless, howling — and a force the likes that Ulquiorra has never seen. 

Ulquiorra will not lose. He _cannot_. If Kurosaki has something to fight for and something to die for, Ulquiorra _does too_. In their lands there is no justice; there is no _deserved_ winner. 

He digs into all his reserves of strength. He calls upon his deepest wells, his every sense. No hollow, no being in Las Noches, has _ever_ beaten him when he’s _tried_. He has only released his second resurrección once, ever, and pierced through the veil of _worlds_. 

But he does. He does lose, and it comes as a shock heavier than none other. His torso is blasted open, every intestine searing, and while the physical pain is great, the staggering realisation that he won’t be able to heal this is greater; and then the sword eats through his chest, and he lies staring at the sky, a farce of a human-turned-hollow standing above him, and thinks— that this is how he falls. If anything, Ulquiorra is a hollow-turned-human, and here he falls to a human-turned-hollow. It would be deserving. 

“Do it,” Ulquiorra says.

Because Grimmjow lives on, and while he does not love Ulquiorra, this would’ve been a fight that he enjoyed. 

And suddenly the other human is there, standing, holding onto the hollow’s wrists. “That’s enough, Kurosaki,” he says. “It’s finished. There’s no need to carve up his corpse.”

Humans and their damnable penchant for _mercy_. But this mercy is what means Grimmjow continues to breathe, so Ulquiorra realises that he is grateful for it.

“Can’t you hear me, Kurosaki?” the human asks again. Ulquiorra never learnt his name. “I’m telling you to stop… If you don’t— you really won’t be human anymore.”

Is that what it means to be human?

Kurosaki impales his friend through the middle with his sword and blood flies like fire. Ulquiorra hears the girl begin to scream. “Kurosaki-kun!”

Kurosaki is not prepared to stop there. He gathers a _cero_ between his horns like a storm and aims it directly at his human friend, all semblance of sense lost, a hollow — such a pitiful, despicable, ruinous, thing — just like them, fully prepared to incinerate his own allies. 

They saved Grimmjow. They were prepared to save Ulquiorra too. 

With the last of his strength, Ulquiorra leaps up, spear in hand, and aims it directly at the mask. It cuts clean and true like the weapon it was always made to be, and the explosion as the building cero destabilises is enormous; it ripples under his skin, flaying the flesh from his bones, and his regeneration desperately knits him together even while he can feel the blood flooding his mouth, seeping from his body.

Ulquiorra barely gets to his feet. He can feel his strength flagging. His regeneration is howling, draining him, sapping him, yet utterly necessary for him to cling to life. 

Kurosaki is face-down on the ground, and with a thunderous boom, the clouds overhead parting, in a shockwave blast, the hole in his chest fills and he jolts upright, breathing. “Inoue?” he says, sweating all over, clearly disoriented. “You’re okay?”

Ulquiorra could care less. He casts his reiatsu out, searching, more thoroughly, this time. And then he feels it. _Grimmjow_. Faint, distant, but undeniably alive. 

He hears his name. Kurosaki is looking at him. He’s getting to his feet. “Cut off my left arm and leg!” he announces in a sudden desertion of all sense. “You’ve been fighting me hollowified and unaware, but that’s _not me._ If we’re gonna finish this, it’ll be on even footing!”

That sounds like exactly the nonsense the Grimmjow would say. 

Ulquiorra begins to crumble. His wings disintegrate to ash. His reiatsu is fading. “Ah,” he says when he feels it giving out, and knows that the humans have noticed. 

He’d burnt out, like a star. The girl is coming towards him. It was good while it lasted. He’d had the chance to feel _alive_. And he thinks he has started to understand Grimmjow now. He thinks he has started to understand _himself_. This was simply how it meant to be; the narrative for him had already been laid out, all along. He was not strong enough to survive, but at least, at the very least, he could die _satisfied_. No longer empty. 

“Wait!” the girl says. She grabs his hand, but it’s already gone, dust. She looks like she’s about to cry. Why cry for him? 

Then the wind carries him away, like foam on the water, and he doesn’t wonder anymore, because he doesn’t exist.

*

_ Epilogue.  _

On rainy days, the sea is louder than ever. On rainy days, there are no beach-goers, either, so he likes them best. Inoue makes him take a bright pink umbrella because she thinks it’s funny. It also makes him easy to spot, so she knows when he’s coming down the street. 

The rain’s coming down harder than ever. Despite the umbrella, he is sopping due to nothing but the sheer force of the gale and the whipping water. Puddles form huge reflective surfaces along the sidewalk, and the sand is all compact due to the rain. The waves are wild. 

He stares out into the sea. It is nothing like Hueco Mundo seas. The sand is nothing like Hueco Mundo’s sand. In fact, he’s already beginning to forget what Hueco Mundo’s sand was like. In his mind, it is replaced by _this_ sand — this sand that is filled with small crabs rather than bones, and changes with the seasons rather than remain forever; and the black acid sea is replaced by the memory of this sea that sometimes is placid as an infinite mirror or turbulent with the elements churning it. 

Like his memories of Hueco Mindo’s sea, the memories of his emptiness are fast fading, replaced with the vividness of being alive. He can taste the rain. He can feel it cling to his eyelashes. Today when he was preparing lunch he could smell the waft of soy sauce and cooking alcohol and simply relished in it. 

He thumbs at the hole in his throat — the reminder of what he is — and stares out into the ocean while it crashes and leaps. He has taken the time to learn to be more human. He has taken the time to learn to understand his heart. He has taken a year. He hasn’t returned to Hueco Mundo ever since he re-materialised on the wind. It hadn't taken the ability to reject events. It hadn't taken kindness, or a miracle. He had simply underestimated his own ability, his own tenacity, or the world's intentions for him. Perhaps he can never be killed. 

He simply walked into the human world and turned up on Inoue's doorstep one day, and she'd let him in. She lived alone. 

The rain roars. 

There’s a newspaper clipping that she'd found for him in the national library archives. She’d made a photocopy and taken it home, at the time. It was an article dated for twenty years ago about a little boy who’d been found starved dead inside his mother’s cupboard. A little more digging had revealed photos of the boy, and if Ulquiorra hadn’t instantly, gut-deep, _known_ already, the pictures of stunning likeliness to him only confirmed it. 

Ichimaru had lied to him all along. It is not surprising, but he realised that he didn’t know what were truths from lies, and had simply decided that it didn’t matter. He had been human once — human enough to suffer and return as a hollow. 

Time passes differently, here. It is a steady and predictable march. The predictability is some sort of comfort. The remaining humans have been battling Soul Society, Wandenreich, and any other being that threatens their existence. He knows Grimmjow is alive in Hueco Mundo but doesn’t want to return. Not yet. Grimmjow needs time and change. He needs to have the reality of defeat sunken into his bones, and he needs — he needs, just as Ulquiorra had — the paradigm shift. Until then, Ulquiorra is content to burn with the low buzz, the cornerstone axiom, of his love of the memory of Grimmjow, his laugh and his warm hands. 

When he comes home, Inoue comes out onto the porch to greet him. She scolds him for getting so wet and tells him that he’s going to catch a cold. He tells her that he wouldn’t catch a cold. He’s a _hollow_. It is beyond his biology. She counters by saying that he sneezed yesterday, and then tells him that she's made tea. When he steps out of his shoes and shakes off the umbrella, he looks up, and sees Grimmjow at the sitting table in the living room. 

Inoue is smiling at him. She sets down tea for them both and then hurries away to give them privacy — and Ulquiorra walks forwards with the faintest hesitation. 

Grimmjow rises from his seat. He looks as beautiful as ever — as if Ulquiorra could’ve ever forgotten. He is every piece as radiant and as living as memory. “Yo,” he says, and then, as pushy as ever, is immediately in Ulquiorra’s space. 

Ulquiorra can feel the heat from his chest. Ridiculous, really, that Grimmjow always wears his clothing open. 

“Were you planning on avoiding me forever?”

“I thought that the status of your reciprocation was clear,” Ulquiorra says. “Whether I avoided you or not would not matter to you.”

“You’re fucking stupid,” Grimmjow says. “But so am I. I was going to tell you that I couldn’t love you the way that you wanted—“ Hearing it still causes a low, hurt, lurch in his chest. “—but at least I could _try_.”

Ulquiorra looks up at him, surprised. He doesn’t think that was what Grimmjow had meant, at the time. And he suspects it hadn’t been. He thinks that maybe Grimmjow means this only after — after the fall of Aizen, after the fall of the Espada. Because they could never survive together while the numbers still reigned. There was too much conflict; too many eyes, too much war, too much struggle for power. 

Any further thought is cut off as Grimmjow lowers his head, slides a hand into Ulquiorra’s long hair, and kisses him. Ulquiorra melts against his lips. 

When they break away, Grimmjow’s eyes are wide, and he is breathing fast. He looks like he wants to take this further, but realises that he’s in someone else’s living room and it would be incredibly improper, and Ulquiorra doesn't even want that. Not yet. Instead, Grimmjow licks his lips, and with what appears to be a great force of will, pulls away. “So!” he says, “what’s it to the human world, huh? How do you think the girl’ll feel about having to feed another mouth?” 

“I do the cooking. It’s enjoyable,” Ulquiorra says. 

Grimmjow stares. “You didn’t use to cook.”

“I didn’t,” Ulquiorra agrees. 

“You didn’t use to do _anything_ ,” Grimmjow says, looking at him as though he’s never seen Ulquiorra before.

Ulquiorra likes reading, too. He enjoys non-fiction. On weekdays he has a guise the shopkeeper made for him so he can take a human form. He works at the ramen bar down the street. The owner there calls him _son_ only half-jokingly. “I do now.”

He does, now. Because he finally lives, now. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
